Canberra illustrator Tony Flowers is living the dream of every young boy or girl who's ever doodled dinosaurs in their school books or drawn a samurai flying on a dragon when they were supposed to be making notes.
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Parents might recognise Flowers' work on their kids' bookshelves. The Canberra lecturer has illustrated 16 children's books with author Nick Falk – their partnership spans four series, from Samurai vs Ninja (about a pair of quarrelling brothers) to Saurus Street (about time-travelling dinosaurs) and How To (a sort of Horrible Histories).
Flowers laughingly describes his career as "a persistent path which requires a lot of stops and starts and eventually you become an overnight success".
He's currently teaching visual literacy at the University of Canberra and is working on his PhD there. He's been drawing for years, from cartoon-filled postcards for his young nieces to a series called Dizzy and Friends, created while he was living in Canberra and working at a "sensible government job" in 2004.
"Every day on my way to work I would pencil the drawings, in my lunch hour I would ink them, and I would go home and digitalise them for the publisher," he says.
Flowers started working with Falk on the kids' books by pure chance. He and his wife took take their dog for a walk on the beach that they don't normally go to – and they ran into Falk, who had also decided to walk his dog on a new beach that day.
"He'd just had a picture book printed with Random House ... and he was looking for an illustrator for a new series called Saurus Street," Flowers says. "My wife turned to me and said, 'He's an illustrator.'"
Flowers read the first story in Saurus Street, which made him laugh, and drew a few cartoon dinosaurs for Falk to check out. It's led to more than a dozen books.
When they finished Saurus Street he suggested a series involving a pair of rival brothers, one a samurai, one a ninja, who get into all manner of fights (none involving actual weapons). "The battles they have involve blowing up balloons and slapping each other with fish and things with bodily gas," Flowers says.
It sounds like the perfect job for a children's illustrator. "You have to tap into the inner child otherwise it doesn't come through on the page. If you're not having fun everything dies on the page," he says. "I'm finally getting to draw everything I ever wanted to as a little boy, but now just as an adult."
