Gillian Tyler: Award-winning Yorkshire artist and illustrator dies

At 10 her aunt Jean entered a picture of hers in the Doncaster Art Fair and to Gillian’s astonishment it won first the first prize of £5.

She found encouragement, too, in her local school.

“I was at primary school at a time when teachers really encouraged creativity,” she recalled. “We used to spend a week creating decorations for the hall. Everything was based around creativity – it just wouldn’t happen today.”

She went to Barnsley Art College before doing a design and illustration degree at what was Manchester Polytechnic in the early 1980s.

She became a jobbing commercial illustrator until one of her long trips to London, to see Walker Books, paid off. The art director there, Amelia Edwards, spotted potential and promised to keep in touch.

True to her word, in 1990 she rang Gillian and offered her a book illustration job. The book in question was The Good Little Christmas Tree which helped her career take off.

Not long after, she took a call to say that Allan Ahlberg was interested in working with her.

Ahlberg was a doyen of children’s books. “He’d recently lost his wife Janet, who worked on a lot of the texts with him, and he just saw something in my work that he liked and asked if I would like to illustrate The Snail House and that began a collaboration which I thoroughly enjoyed,” Gillian remembered.

She later worked with Michael Rosen on The Bus Is For Us and began making wood engravings and prints alongside her book work, some of which she exhibited.