Jonny Duddle

Jonny Duddle lives in North Wales with his wife and young family. When he is not exploring forests and scrumping apples he is found sprawled across his studio floor, drawing and busily inventing worlds.

With his background in the computer games industry, Jonny is very skilled at character development; he initially works with pencil sketches and then draws and paints straight onto his computer using a Wacom tablet. His character designs were an integral part of the development work on Aardman's feature length animation The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists.

Having worked on a pirate ship (climbing up and down riggings), and as an art teacher in the middle of the Kalahari Dessert, it is no wonder that his work spans an exciting selection of projects including his own picture books The Pirate Cruncher and The Pirates Next Door (Templar) winner of the Waterstones Prize and shortlisted for The Sheffield Book Award and the young fiction Beastly Business series for Simon & Schuster. Jonny's cover and inside artwork for Terry Pratchett's bestseller, Nation, was shortlisted for Best Children's Illustrated Books 2009 at the English Association Book Awards.