Have a Quiet Adventure Through Carson Ellis’ Narrative Illustrations

With a limited color palette, delicate linework, and an eye toward American folk art, illustrator Carson Ellis creates dreamy works in fantastic but recognizable worlds. Her illustrations are featured in children’s books The Composer is Dead by Lemony Snicket and Dillweed’s Revenge by Florence Parry Heide, The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, and various album covers. Her works focus on ink and gouache drawings on watercolor paper, allowing Ellis to balance hard edges with misty interior colorscapes to great effect.

Ellis describes her work as “folk art-influenced and narrative,” and says that narrative push in her work could be seen all through her childhood. “It’s something that you would see if you were looking through my elementary school sketchbook. You would see lots of comics, you would see little stories about girls getting ponies for their birthdays. So I think illustration has always been my bend, and even in college when I did work that was more standalone and gallery work, there has always been a narrative quality to it.

Her use of color is restrained, and Ellis candidly describes this being the result of coming from “a place of not knowing how to use color. I was a consummate drawer, I was always drawing in pencil or sharpie, I was never really thinking about color, I was thinking about lines. So as a result I started with this very, very neutral palette.”

Ellis describes her work in children’s books as being, “something I always wanted to do as a kid, but then I was sort of a lazy kid, I was a very bad student. I didn’t really have the foresight or the grades to go to a good art school.” She travelled from her home in the suburbs of New York to the University of Montana where she studied painting. “After college I was making oil paintings and sometimes I would sell them, but mostly I just worked in bars.”

Her illustration career finally kicked began to bloom after she met her husband, musician Colin Meloy of The Decemberists. “I started doing a lot of art for him when his band was just starting out. And that was my first illustration work."  From there, people around Portland, Oregon began seeing her work around town, on flyers and on The Decemberists album covers. “That slowly built into a proper illustration career as The Decemberists slowly built into a proper band, so I got more and more jobs as a result. And eventually I was contacted by an agent who asked if I wanted to do children’s books, and I was like ‘Yes! That’s something I’ve always wanted to do.’”

Ellis loves working in the children’s books realm because kids books “incorporate a lot of things that I love and find creatively gratifying. It’s a really important responsibility to be making really good books for kids, and introducing them to the idea of books. I also just love to draw fantastical stuff, and mystical stuff, and the sort of things I love to draw tend to be well-suited to kids’ books.”

Check out more of Carson Ellis’ work on her site.

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