Marcia Sewall

Marcia Sewall grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, in a home filled with creativity. She often found her mother knitting, sewing, or painting, while her father was the consummate storyteller, spinning tales she loved to listen to. After graduating from Pembroke College, she continued her education by pursuing a Master’s Degree in Education from Tufts University, along with a summer intensive at the Rhode Island School of Design that instilled a sense of discipline in her art training. 

One of her first jobs was “staff artist” for the Boston Children’s Museum which not only included teaching art classes on Saturdays but also taking tickets and assisting with exhibits. She moved on to teaching art to high school students before beginning her noteworthy career as a children’s book illustrator. 

Ms. Sewall begins each book with a similar approach, usually spending about three months on each one.  She writes,

“When I first receive a manuscript, I walk through the story and divide it into pictures. If it’s to be a thirty-two page book, then I am limited to about thirteen double-page spreads. I begin to immediately struggle with the sense of character, and then on to the transformation of that flat surface into a believable space. An author gives me clues as to person and place and then it’s a matter of sorting them out…I next try to capture the rhythm and movement of the story in the dummy book. Although I may not immediately ‘see’ a character, I have to believe that it’s within me to see him or her. On reading and rereading a manuscript, a sense of person begins to emerge and it is that which I try to capture in my initial sketches.”

Ms. Sewall herself enjoys the sensation of movement and believes her love of motion assists her in creating movement with the figures on her sketchpad. Although her characters aren’t intentionally based on real people, people she knows often show up in the books she illustrates. It could be a young man at the corner grocery who appears in a sketch or an acquaintance whose peculiar sitting posture she had noted that inhabits another book. She says,

“I think an artist is constantly taking in visual impressions, but not always consciously. And you don’t deliberately pull them out. They come.”

Working with an assortment of mediums, Marcia Sewall fills her illustrations with variety. On some she enjoys utilizing scratchboard, scratching a white line away from the black ink surface, while on others painting with colorful gouache brings her pure joy!

Although she primarily illustrates books, Marcia Sewall both authored and illustrated several featuring the New England history and landscape she so loves. In the companion books, The Pilgrims of Plimoth and People of the Breaking Day she sought to convey the rituals of daily life, a sense of community, and their efforts of survival in a harsh land for both groups of inhabitants—the early settlers just arriving to the new world and the Wampanoag Indians who had long made their home in the same area of southeastern Massachusetts. 

Many illustrators find inspiration from other artists and creators, and Marcia Sewall is no exception. While Beatrix Potter is just one of her many favorite illustrators, Carl Sandburg and Nathaniel Hawthorne are two authors she greatly admires; “Hawthorne for his sense of New England character, and Sandburg for his great feeling for people and earth.”  Marcia Sewall, too, conveys similar sentiments in her own body of work. She writes,

“I do love to translate words into pictures. I love to draw out of my imagination people and places. I somehow think that my strong desire to illustrate children’s books made it possible for me to become an illustrator.”

Receiving many awards for her work including the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for nonfiction for The Pilgrims of Plimoth along with the New England Book award for children's books from the New England Booksellers Association, Marcia Sewall has a distinctive style that has contributed vibrancy to the shelves of children’s books in libraries across the country.

—Deanna Knoll