Illustrator Marianna Marx

There's a dreamy, delicate whimsy to the surreal pencil-and-watercolour world of Marianna Marx. It has been delighting regulars to Melbourne design markets like Rose Street, the Queen Vic Night Market, Fed Square's Markit and the Northcote Town Hall's Kris Kringle Night Market for the past few years and has earned her representation at Signed and Numbered print gallery alongside high profile names like Miso, Ghostpatrol and Tai Snaith. Most importantly, however, it has been entertaining the quietly spoken artist herself for as long as she can remember.

Marianna grew up in Camberwell in Melbourne's eastern suburbs drawing whatever popped into her head on whatever she could get her hands on – a habit she retains to this day. She was hooked on drawing as a kid and vividly recalls filling her first sketchbook – a gift in early primary school that came with a particularly exciting set of watercolours.

 "I was probably in Prep, I think, so about five years old, and I remember going through a whole sketchbook in a couple of days just having so much fun using way too much water," Marianna recalls. "All the pages got soaked. I've always had sketchbooks for as long as I can remember. I've got piles and piles at my parents' house up in the attic."

Pencil and watercolour firmed up as her medium of choice early on but she has experimented widely with sketchbook styles, road-testing various formats, sizes and paper types. "I don't think I've got one type of sketchbook," she says. "When I was doing art at school there was a lot of pressure that ... each page should be beautiful in the sketchbook and really well ordered and showing your trial and error very clearly. And I just found that so fake. I found those sketchbooks just completely contrived. I have sketchbooks all the time, but a lot of my sketches are just on whatever piece of paper I have with me at the time."

Post It notes, maths homework, bills or shopping lists have always worked just as well for capturing her ideas in the moment as beautiful moleskin journals or thick, creamy watercolour paper. "Sometimes some of the best drawings come out when it's just a piece of paper that has no real value to you, or monetary value either," she says. In preparation for our interview Marianna's mum produced a whole box of doodled treasures retrieved over the years from the desk in her home office. "When I was living at home she said that every single time she'd go to her desk there'd be like a Post It note I'd scribbled on, the back of all her bills would be scribbled on, because I'd sit on the phone and draw," Marianna says.

After high school Marianna studied Visual Arts at Monash, followed by a Diploma in Illustration at Chisholm. She has been illustrating professionally for about four years, since holding her first market stall and launching her website. "I guess that's when I first started to think about making money from my artwork, with the goal of being able to do this as my full-time career," she says. "But I did it really gradually. I just did a market here and there and had my online store. I just kept refining it – and still am refining it, how to best present my work."

 Setting aside time to sketch is central to her practice. She keeps a pencil, jar, fine brushes and a portable set of watercolours with her to ensure she can capture ideas when they come to her – while watching fashionistas stroll around Rose Street, for example, or while one of the young art students she tutors is busy working on an observational drawing. The crucial thing is not the type of book or surface she uses but the act of creative play itself. Spontaneous sketching is "the one place where you can play", according to Marianna. "And I think you're really limiting yourself if you trying to make each page look like a presentable piece of art," she says. "Sometimes that does still creep in but then I just think, 'This is for no one else but me'."

"I've been listening to a few podcasts lately about creativity and a lot of them are staying that that's the place that creativity comes from, a place of complete play and willingness to make mistakes."

Unlike artists who regularly trawl through their sketchbooks looking for images that still resonate and seem to demand further development, Marianna rarely leafs through the pages of old sketchbooks. Important images tend to return to her spontaneously. "Today when I was looking through all these sketchbooks I was like, 'Oh, I want to draw that and that and that idea, so it might be something to put into practice," she says with a laugh. "But unless they kind of come back to me ... naturally I don't like the idea of going back to a drawing because I really do think they were reflective of that period in time or that part of my life. I want to just stay in the present, and I feel like I've maybe got out whatever I needed to draw then and so I don't really need to do it again."

But when an idea she has sketched – sometimes years before – appears again and again in her mind's eye, she knows it's a lead worth following. The rudimentary pencil sketch of a winged girl (above) inspired the recently completed illustration (below), but Marianna had forgotten the sketch existed until she began toying with themes she couldn't seem to shake. "I remember always wanting to do something with these wings made out of twigs that a girl has tied together," she says. "I was wanting them to look like she's made them. And then I was thinking about this idea of puzzles and piecing things together and solving your own problems, and that (old) image popped back into mind."

The carefree playfulness of sketching often captures more than just fertile themes, and is starting to change the way she approaches finished artwork. "I often find that the sketches and sketchbook will ... really capture the gesture and the spontaneity and looseness of what I'm trying to express so much more than when I go to do the final artwork," Marianna says. "And so a lot of the time now I'm just trying to capture those spontaneous, loose lines (and) I've started drawing directly onto the 'nice' paper. It is completely not economical, at all, but I'll try and just draw straight onto there and kind of pretend I'm drawing in my sketchbook even though it's a three dollar piece of paper," she says with a laugh. 

Like most of us Marianna, admits she struggles to find time for creative play the busier she gets, but it's something she's prioritising at present. "It's definitely a work in progress," she says. "It's hard sometimes when you've only got an hour and you need to finish something to think, 'Oh I'm just going to experiment'. But I think it's vital in challenging yourself and in progressing. Sometimes I feel a bit stuck and I think it's because of a lack of play. The times it's best for me to play are when I've set the time aside for it so I'm really relaxed and calm and just trying to be open to whatever comes."

Ideas often emerge in the precise colours she'll use in the final artwork, but their timing is utterly random. Marianna loves drawing from nature and often finds herself sketching in parks and on beaches little botanical studies that later weave their way into her work. Observational studies of human figures are a constant too, and prove their worth when she's later trying to nail particular stances or gestures in imaginary characters. Generally, though, she prefers to sketch in private. "I've always wanted to be one of those artists that could sit in a cafe and observe people," Marianna she says. "But I always feel really shy doing that, and really kind of exposed. So I tend to do it either at night before I fall asleep, or in my studio, or my room." 

Marianna's illustrations are populated by solitary figures or adventurous pairs, often dwarfed by fantastical surroundings or preoccupied with surreal endeavours. Deceptively simple, strangely elusive vignettes are packed with recurring themes like bare trees and autumn leaves that are rich in personal symbolism for the artist. For the viewer, who can only guess at the layers of meaning underlying each piece, it's ripe territory for the imagination. 

Images from nature inspire Marianna with their beauty, but also offer "a way of telling little stories", she says. "The ideas themselves, the actual concepts, I think come from so many different things. They're usually quite personal things like a conversation I've had with someone. They might not look all that expressive or emotional but I see a direct relationship between whatever's happening in my life at that moment in time and the drawings I do. I think there's a lot of personal symbolism. 

For Marianna, sketching is about capturing thoughts visually "before your brain can interject too much". Allowing time for these thoughts to percolate through her subconscious and morph into a story with personal resonance is vital for her work as an illustrator. "Sometimes I get a bit impatient and it's really ... not beneficial to your work because you might rush an idea before it's had that percolating time," she says. "If you can just sit with it for a while it will be so much better and it will come out so much more naturally than trying to force it." A story will emerge from life, a day dream, a song lyric or a series of images that she can't shake, which will eventually transform her initial thought into a fully formed narrative – of sorts. Marianna is careful not to stitch up her stories so tightly there's no room for viewers to interpret them through the lens of their own experiences and associations. "I kind of like the idea of leaving it really open with no setting or background so that hopefully other people can read into it with their own stories and kind of attach their own experiences," she says.

Book illustrator and author Elise Hurst

Illustrator and children's book author Elise Hurst has the gift of an unassuming little A5 moleskin sketchbook to thank for the heroine of her exquisite new book Adelaide's Secret World (Allen and Unwin). It's a story designed to appeal as much to adults as children about the difficulty of reaching out to others and making connections, and it's being launched this weekend as part of Elise's second solo show at QV's No Vacancy Gallery in Melbourne, which runs from 11-22 November. The exhibition showcases the sumptuous oil paintings through which Adelaide's story is told. Like all the evocative, surreally anthropomorphic, richly detailed stories, prints and cards Elise has produced over the past decade or so, it grew from the seeds of her incredible pint-sized sketchbooks.

Elise is the daughter of a painter in a family brimming with keen amateur artists. She grew up doodling and drawing characters on anything she could find, announced her intention to become an artist in early primary school, and found classroom fame via a series of unflattering caricatures of teachers she hid in secret compartments in her folders. "People get paid money for them now," she says. "Big noses, big ears, strange expressions. From a fairly early age I drew to get a reaction from people around me. I love showing stuff if I think it's worked out alright. Otherwise I quickly cover it up and don't let people see it until I've managed to fix it."

Elise accumulated a few sketchbooks by late high school. "In year 12 I used to sit up on the roof at my parents' house and try and do landscapes, which felt daring," she recalls. "They weren't very good, but it was fun sitting up on the roof." Mostly, though, she preferred drawing "on school books and corners of things, probably like every kid does," she says. Even into adulthood the pristine pages of sketchbooks induced in her a pressure to succeed rather than permission to play. "Sketchbooks are beautiful but there can be a lot of stress in them as well that I find I don't have with doodling. So I have to kind of work around my own peculiar insecurities to be able to really enjoy working in them."

The moleskin journal that changed the course of her life was given to Elise on the eve of a trip to Paris with her husband Peter about 10 years ago. True to her primary school word she had carved out a career for herself as a freelance illustrator - a jack of all trades who for 13 years sustained a punishing schedule working seven days a week and evenings (with a half-day off for Christmas!) churning out everything from educational series to other authors' children's books. She had fallen early and hard for the classic freelancer trap of not know when to say now, habitually over-committing herself, and never scheduling recovery time between projects. It was an exhilarating and exhausting way to work, and it left her with no time to draw for pure, personal pleasure. Worse still, perhaps, she had been adapting her style to fit the perceived need of each new project for so long she really wasn't sure what her unique, natural style really was.

The freedom of a holiday and hours spent in cafes doodling in her little sketchbook reconnected Elise to the bliss of drawing for no one but herself. With time and space for her unconscious mind to play she found herself lost in drawings inspired by whatever intriguing characters, streetscapes or events she happened to spy from her window seat. "Just being in that altered place, that altered state, you have to walk away from work - although I know I was working as well, I was finishing a book - and so to take a sketchbook with you when you're travelling is great," she says. "I often don't put much in it, but you're in the right zone, you're in a different frame of mind altogether.

"You have to switch everything else off," she says. "I like to go to a cafe so that the busy part of my brain that worries about what I should be doing and making lists of jobs and thinking about times and dates gets occupied by the hum around me. And then I can just look out the window and dream and start drawing. I find it hard to do at home, even now. I still spend too much money in cafes."

One of her first drawings was actually at Montmartre Cemetery - a loose a pencil sketch of a graveside statute:

...but what began to emerge in the days after were radically different and a world away from the brightly coloured oil colour paintings she'd been producing for many years:

Intricately rendered black and white scenes unfolded on page after page - rich with finely observed period details, ornately patterned interiors, evocative lighting, and intriguing little characters whose stories seem somehow suspended in time. 

Elise returned to these images again and again, adding layers of detail, personal symbolism, and increasingly surreal settings. Eventually she realised that what her subconscious mind was doing, given time to play at last, was producing fragments of characters and stories she could use in any way she chose. Many from that first sketchbook went on to appear in the first book she wrote as well as illustrated, The Night Garden.

On her return home to Australia Elise bought another little moleskin, and then another and another. In the years since she has filled each to bursting with ideas and scenes and characters - strange moments in time she returns to again and again, reworking and refining over months and years. 

She has learned to be patient and return to images only as their stories gradually make themselves known to her:

Her judicious use of spot colour often transforms a scene completely:

Once Elise cut back her unwieldy work schedule to focus on those projects she felt truly passionate about, more stories of her own emerged. The influence of her sketches is plain to see in her sublime Imagine a City:

...and now in Adelaide's Secret World:

It's fascinating to discover that in her early sketches Elise envisaged the main characters as humans, rather than a rabbit and a fox:

Overcoming her earlier aversion to sketchbooks took time and the odd mind game or two. "I actually found it really hard using these sketchbooks for the first time because they're very special and they're very pretty, and so I actually had to overcome a fear that I had that you don't have when you're doodling on fractions of paper (that are) already imperfect to start with," Elise says. "So the hard thing I found about picking up these moleskins is that they're beautiful and it was all this pressure to not screw it up. And so I have to start in the middle. I can never start on the first page, that's an absolute no-no. In fact I often don't have anything on the first page except a phone number in case I lose it, because I desperately want it back. 

Maintaining the sense of agenda-less play so central to the success of these sketchbooks is an ongoing challenge. "One of the problems I've got now is because I use so many of the images for cards and prints and things like that, I find myself sometimes thinking about what this picture could be used for as I'm doing it. It's like throwing a bucket of cold water over your head. It's just takes all the fun out of it while you're drawing. So I have to try and really keep it all about just free-form doodling and not having an agenda."

Like so many busy professional artists Elise still struggles to make time for this languid creative play, which comes so naturally when she's travelling. But she sees it now as absolutely essential to her practice. "I learned over time to acknowledge that this was actually an important part of my work, it just didn't directly translate into a book," she says. "I didn't understand until I'd done it that it is actually essential if you want to grow your own career, and have a style, and have something that you can do that no one else can do, you have to give yourself this time just to experiment and actually develop."

"Some of that can happen through work but with illustration it's so directed that it's very hard for it to happen through work. You know what you need to be doing every time you put your pencil on the paper. There's parts of your brain that just aren't used, that are used exclusively when you're doing this kind of stuff."

Anything can become a source of inspiration for the sketchbooks - the corner of an old building, a dog tied to a post, or people she spots who already look like they've already stepped out of a children's book. Characters and details she's drawn to again and again sometimes wind their way into a narrative that plays out inside her head over many years, to which she necessarily brings her own experiences and preoccupations. A mass of swirling clouds she found herself sketching often took 10 years to eventually weave into a book. 

These days her sketchbooks function as "fragments of stories", Elise says. "I focus on narrative ideas, but instead of having to make sense of an idea and flesh it out and have lots of different moments of that idea ... it's like I've leapt into the most interesting, exciting, surreal bit of a narrative. 

"So you start with that thing you see, which might be somebody standing there or the corner of a building and you start drawing it then you look for the story in the scene, or around that person. Ideas will just slowly come and you start drawing them and it just builds and builds. And you're always looking for that strange thing that just seems to shift it, so that you don't quite understand what's happening. .Just something that's out of place, something that's off-kilter."

For many artists the act of sketching in the moment is an end in itself. They barely look at the results again, much less mine them for years to come. But for Elise these little worlds are ongoing sources of sustenance. "I'm building a bank of ideas and thoughts and bits of stories and they give me so much pleasure," she says. "And I really like revisiting them. When I flick through one of these sketchbooks it's like taking a trip down memory lane of a life I didn't have."

Delve into more of Elise's incredible work at http://www.elisehurst.com/ or check out her exhibition at QV's No Vacancy Gallery, 34-40 Jane Bell Lane, Melbourne http://no-vacancy.com.au/

Fashion Illustrator Angie Rehe of Patsyfox.com

Freelance fashion illustrator Angie Rehe began keeping a sketchbook at the suggestion of her high school art teacher, and has accumulated shelves full in her home studio in Northcote since her days as a fashion design student at RMIT in the late 1980s. But she admits she's ambivalent about their contents.

Angie Rehe of patsyfox.com

& thedrawingsalon.com

"If you notice the amount of sketchbooks I have there's a million, and I think there's two that are full," she says. "Apparently I'm very good at starting sketchbooks and not very good at finishing them. I can't help buying them, because (of) the potential when you flick through a gorgeous sketchbook of it being filled with fantastic drawings. But then I want to go on to a new one after a certain way through it."

The blessing and curse of a sketchbook is that it's a spontaneous and therefore uneven collection: visual treasure and trash that provides a great visual snapshot of your life, skills and preoccupations at the time but which can be unintentionally hilarious and excruciatingly embarrassing to look back on, much less to share with anyone else. 

"I go backwards and forwards on my view of ... whether you can edit a sketchbook or whether you commit to keeping everything in," Angie says. "I personally think that you should keep your sketchbooks fairly private so that when you draw in them you're not drawing through other people's eyes. It's like dance as if no one's watching. If you're thinking about other people flicking through your sketchbook or showing other people you're going to be self-conscious about the drawing and you're not going to be as loose, and you're not going to experiment, and they're just not as good."

The problem is, as a freelance fashion illustrator, it can be useful to show clients particular sketches in books you know they won't be able to resist flicking through, and which you know also contain the odd bung-eyed portrait and nudes of ex-boyfriends you'd rather not share. Thankfully, scanning and Instagramming the desired sketch now offers the perfect way out of that particular bind. 

Unapologetic, warts-and-all self-expression is fine for the fearless, but for mere mortals the ideal sketchbook would surely allow users to surreptitiously purge duds and add gems at will? "I talk about this when I teach drawing, that I don't believe every drawing has a right to life," Angie says with a laugh. "I did a big edit of my old sketchbooks and drawings a few years ago and it was actually the best thing I ever did. Because there's no point keeping old work that you really hate, that's just bad, and therefore makes you feel bad when you look at it.

"I find I can remember how I was feeling when I drew things, so when I look at a drawing it conjures up the situation I was in at the time and whether I was happy or not. So if a drawing has those feelings embedded in it that you don't like, I think just get the hell rid of it. I got rid of all my shittiest work, and my self-esteem went up so much because then when I went through my drawers and books - I keep drawings all over the place - I'd see my favourite work and I'd start believing my own hype, that I did lots of good stuff, because I'd eliminated the evidence.

"You do want to keep some old stuff so that you see progress, though. This is the flip side of this argument. Because progression is good, getting better at something is good, so you want to be able to see the evidence of that - where you came from and what you do now. But, if they're a bit grotesque, I say burn 'em."

Keeping sketchbooks was a habit that came easily to a gal who has always loved to draw and felt the urge to capture ideas in the moment. "I would always carry around this small notebook and a pencil and while I was stuck waiting or listening or something I would sketch," Angie recalls of her RMIT years. "It was part of what I was doing, I guess - studying fashion and therefore having ideas, and always liking drawing and wanting to draw and to practice that. So it was just natural." 

These days she waxes and wanes in her approach, often allowing the sketchbook itself to suggest new routines and materials worth trying. "It's all about experimenting," she says. The glorious Italian paper of a Fabriano sketchbook begs for works in watercolour, but in other sketchbooks she plays with inks, pencils and collage too. Lately she's been experimenting with portable media like Tombow and Japanese watercolour pens. A few years back a day-to-a-page Moleskin diary inspired her to attempt daily drawings, often as a warm up exercise for commercial work or paintings for her blog. "It was hard," Angie concedes. "I said to myself, 'it doesn't matter how quick or little it is,' but it was really, really hard. So I'd get behind and I'd cheat - I'd take it to life drawing and fill in a bunch of pages. Sometimes I'd use it for rough sketches of what were going to be bigger works ... and it worked quite well for that. But I got to about August and just fell in a complete heap."

Angie's a dedicated sketcher when she travels. A tiny, concertina-style sketchbook she filled with streetscapes and building details as well as portraits and fashion sketches during a 2012 trip to New York, Paris and London led directly to a visual merchandising assignment on her return to Melbourne. She also found inspiration on that trip from a road atlas discarded on rubbish night outside the New York apartment she was staying in. She'd never before considered doing life drawings on maps,  but found herself temporarily obsessed, despite the obvious challenges. "It's kind of visually confusing to draw on something so busy but I really liked the look of it," she says. 

The most impressive travel sketchbooks she's ever flicked through belong to Brooklyn-based fashion illustrator Bil Donovan. He builds up montages of images like the faces of various train commuters he spots on his journeys, often adding layers of colour and detail back in his studio. "They're just magnificent," Angie says.

Sketching in public elicits some fascinating responses from passersby. "If you draw in public people feel absolutely open to coming up," Angie says. "They'll stand and watch over your shoulder and they'll start talking to you. You suddenly become public property." 

It can make for some intriguing conversations, but it also pulls her out of the deeply meditative, utterly self-contained space she disappears into when she draws. Her favourite part of the whole sketching process, in fact. "When I'm drawing I just kind of disengage with what's around, so it's just my own personal head space," Angie says. "I think that drawing has a very meditative feel, because it's so right brain. When you are really into it you're in your own little world. And if that is in a foreign location or wherever, all the better."

Check out Angie's amazing illustrations and workshops on patsyfox.com and thedrawingsalon.com.