Ashley Mackenzie

Illustrations for Summer Reading, beginning on p. 41

“As I sketched illustrations for the Summer Reading package, I kept thinking about the pictures I’ve seen of an empty Toronto during the pandemic, which is very bizarre to me. I lived there for five years. That’s not a city that was ever empty. Even if you were out at one in the morning, you could see people out and about and cars all over the place. I wanted to echo a bit of that. The lights in the illustration are everyone’s homes — there’s still life there.”

Ashley Mackenzie is an Edmonton-based artist and illustrator. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic, and Scientific American.