Travels With My Sketchbook

Michael Foreman (born 21 March 1938) is one of the UK's best-known and most prolific creators of children's books. He won the 1982 and 1989 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration and he was a commended runner-up five times. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, he was the UK nominee in 1988 and again in 2010 for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books internationally. Michael was awarded the OBE in the 2022 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to literature. Michael Foreman (born 21 March 1938) is one of the UK's best-known and most prolific creators of children's books. He won the 1982 and 1989 Kate Greenaway Medals for British children's book illustration and he was a commended runner-up five times. For his contribution as a children's illustrator, he was the UK nominee in 1988 and again in 2010 for the Hans Christian Andersen Award, the highest recognition available to creators of children's books internationally. Michael was awarded the OBE in the 2022 Queen's Birthday Honours List for his services to literature.

"This extraordinary volume is an inspiration. The images, mostly in pen and watercolour and using the colours of sunsets and sweets, are an incentive to draw and to take a sketchbook everywhere you go in hope of one day achieving something like Foreman's skilled and loving line.

They invite you in, to scrutinise detail and absorb atmosphere, and they reward prolonged contemplation. They also seduce you with the variety of the world, while nuggets of text tell lyrical travellers' tales, like the wayfaring rat in The Wind of the Willows, until you have to hold yourself back from heading for the horizon.

From New York to Los Angeles, Mexico to Mongolia, the Holy Land to the Himalayas, Norway to Nigeria, Venice to the Valley of the Kings, Foreman captures the strangeness and beauty of landscape and people.

He savours particularly the splendours of Asia - of Bali, India and China - and has a talent for sneaking away from tours and schedules to discover, alone and without intervention, the essence of a place. In Japan, Foreman painted Mount Fuji 36 times, as did Hokusai, the artist with whom he most identifies. Ultimately, he also persuades us of our common global humanity, showing that football and family, for instance, matter universally." Nicolette Jones The Sunday Times