FRANCES CASTLE – ARTIST SPOTLIGHT
Frances Castle is not only an illustrator, she’s a musician, graphic storyteller and boasts Jarvis Cocker as one of her biggest fans.
Frances moved from the computer games design industry to illustration in 2005 and hasn’t looked back, with a number of successful fiction and non-fiction titles exploring history, discovery, travel and folktales. She’s an avid collector of old comics and children’s books and all things retro, as well as being fascinated with forgotten landscapes, both urban and rural. All these influences have given her work a strong sense of time and place and a wonderful nostalgic feel.
Frances’ personal work constantly feeds into her commercial illustration work. Her other passion is music and she wanted a creative space of her own to collaborate with musicians she admires and to experiment with sleeve design so she set up her own independent record label, Clay Pipe Music. The label has gained a huge following and regularly releases beautifully designed, limited-edition vinyl records.
Recent vinyl sleeve covers illustrated by Frances Castle include:
D Rothon - Memories of Earth, the second album by multi-instrumentalist David “D” Rothon explores his childhood memories of 20th Century space race, sparked by a visit to the Moving To Mars exhibition at the Design Museum in 2019.
Andrew Wasylyk - Balgay Hill: Morning in Magnolia, "is as much a daydream rubric through solitude as it is a mediative map. An invite to untold stories and images that take flight in the listener’s mind."
Frances Castle is represented by Arena Illustration.