Elena Arévalo Melville is an award winning Latin American author of children’s books, illustrator, map maker and ceramic artist.

Welcome to my webpage, a collection of things I have done over decades as an artist and an author. I hope I have made it easy enough to navigate and illustrate who I am, where I come from and how I can add to your event or project.

Photo ©UCPS

Photo ©UCPS

I am a proud member of a wonderful and committed children’s book community keen to bring to children of the world the books they need. I am drawn to themes of identity and belonging, love and imagination, loss and redemption.

Children are sophisticated clever people and it is an honour to write for them.

 
 
With fellow writer illustrators Holly Sterling (on my right) and Steve Antony in gorgeous Bologna during the International Children’s Book Fair! Photo by Holly’s fiend.

With fellow writer illustrators Holly Sterling (on my right) and Steve Antony in gorgeous Bologna during the International Children’s Book Fair!

Photo by Holly’s friend.

Book work is team work.

I am open to ideas, whatever shape they take, or who may drag them in…

This is Schrody, dragger-in extraordinaire who juggled a mouse into our umbrella one day, and so unlocked a bit of one story…

This is Schrody, dragger-in extraordinaire who juggled a mouse into our umbrella one day, and so unlocked a bit of one story…

I draw from a wide range of artistic expressions to write.

When creating a picture, whether with words or images, I engage the skills I’ve squirrelled over half a lifetime of creativity: how to move through classical ballet, how to solve multilevel problems as a student of architecture, how to make by removing with stone carving; how to layer and mask with screen printing; how to combine colour and form through many years as a painter and how to feel my way around things and slowly refining the surface as I do with my ceramics.

I also love sharing these skills.

Photo ©UCPS

Photo ©UCPS

 

I experiment with surfaces and mark making.

I am fascinated by marks, particularly the unintended ones made by traditional media. The unpredictable splurge on a piece of paper, the scratch of the old pen, the hard bristle brush removing paint in a pattern. I am drawn to all such “flaws”.

I take colour seriously.

My Ma Dissertation was in Colour and Culture. But what really thrills me is colour in context, colour in practice.

My stories develop their own chromatic space even before the narrative or the characters is completely defined. I am a serious colour collector and take pleasure in mixing paint and cataloguing my own recipes.

I bring my imagined into the physical world.

Wheather a ravine, a home or a nose, I like seeing and resolving imagined space and action in the real world.

The process of feeling the form informs more than just geometry, it also opens new questions, about the interaction of characters as bodies in space.

Each book knows where it needs to be, how it needs to look, what it needs to say. I just allow myself to follow.

Thank you for coming with me.

 

The backdrop of my childhood in Guatemala, volcanoes: Agua, Fuego and Acatenango.

Ceramics

Clay is not only part of my creative process for writing. It’s also an art form that saves me from screen time and book making isolation.

I make my ceramics by slabbing or coiling them on a table or I throw pieces on Dilys (my lovely wheel) which I bough mid pandemic thanks to the Society of Authors’ generous award for my picture book.

If you would like to have a look, please visit my ceramics tab.