“I love Christmas – it’s the only time of year you can turn off your phone and laptop as there’s an unwritten rule that everyone else is off, too”
She may be a bestselling illustrator but Johanna Basford’s life is rarely black and white. She colours in the details for Catherine Butler
According to Johanna Basford, queen of the hand-drawn line and creator of four international best-selling adult colouring books, if you can find something that sparks joy in you, then you’re on to a winner. For her, there is nothing more joyful than getting to sit down in front of a blank white page and create every day, and as a pretty big fan of the festive season, it’s safe to assume that her fifth book, Johanna’s Christmas (Virgin Books), on sale in every bookshop between her native Scotland and Shanghai, will be as much of a runaway success as her previous titles, which have collectively sold more than 20 million copies. Inside you’ll find prancing reindeer, holly-crowned hares and intricate patterns of wintry foliage, all laced with hidden creatures and curiosities.
Just as Johanna’s first book, The Secret Garden, recalls her magical outdoors Scottish childhood, her latest ‘inky treasure hunt’ is a glimpse inside her own Christmas, steeped in the traditional joys of beribboned presents and gingerbread men. “It’s all quite homespun here, not a very slick operation at all,” she says with a laugh. There are the cut-out snowflakes and paper-chain decorations she’ll be making with her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Evie; the homemade iced biscuits and pomanders they’ll hang on the tree; and the mulled wine that her husband, craft-beer producer BrewDog founder James Watt, will undoubtedly have on the go in the kitchen. Johanna never buys a wreath, but instead always makes her own with holly, fir and pine cones, foraged from walks around her home in rural Aberdeenshire. “I love bringing the outdoors in at Christmas. Greenery has such a fresh, alpiney smell.”
The Scottish countryside has long fed Johanna’s imagination, and from her white-washed studio in the attic of her converted farmhouse, just seven miles from where she grew up on a fish farm in Auchnagatt, Johanna’s desk looks out onto nothing but fields. “I
need to be surrounded by nature,” she says. “I think I’d struggle to do the same work in London surrounded by concrete – or even in Dundee, by granite.” Ten years ago, this was exactly where Johanna could be found; drowning in debt from art college, in a small one-bed flat. She worked two jobs, in a shop and a restaurant, and on every day off she’d take the overnight Megabus to London to try to drum up commercial illustration work. It was a grim time, she says, but a vital one, because while she admits that luck has certainly played its part in her career, hard work has played a much greater role. After many months, Johanna slowly began building a successful freelance career. Her signature hand-drawn monochrome style, which shunned the growing trend for cold and clinical computer-generated imagery, caught the eye of highstreet brands such as H&M and Nike, for the likes of whom she’d often find herself working through
the night to meet a deadline. “You can have all the ambition in the world, but if you don’t love something, you’re never going to be able to make the sacrifices that need to be made,” she says.
Johanna has always been ambitious, and has already achieved much in her 33 years. Perhaps because she spent much of her 20s using every hour to ‘lay the foundations’ of her dream career, but it’s also thanks, she says, to having James at her side. “It would have been very difficult if we hadn’t been together,” says Johanna, who met him at a Prince’s Trust for Scotland event ten years ago – he had just brewed his first beer, while her freelance career was in its infancy. “If he didn’t enjoy his job or had a more traditional role, I think he’d struggle to understand that sometimes you have to be up at 5am for a Skype call, or miss Sunday lunch. I know not everyone likes to talk about work in the evenings, but it’s so wrapped up in who we are that it’s great to be able to sit down with someone over a cup of tea at 9pm, and know they’ll listen to that bonkers idea you have but wouldn’t dream of bringing up in a meeting.” Rather than rivalling each other, having two demanding businesses under one roof has added fuel to each other’s fire (Johanna illustrated some early bottle labels for BrewDog, in fact). But please don’t call them entrepreneurs. “We hate that word,” warns Johanna. “For us it’s more about finding what you love and making it work in the real world.”
By 2013, Johanna faced the unappealing prospect of scaling back her commercial work, because with her first child due the following June, she knew she wouldn’t be able to keep up the pace for long. “I’d rather turn down a job than deliver bad work or miss a deadline,” she says, “But it’s hard to be realistic and say, I can’t do that, I have a baby to care for.” Fortunately, the solution presented itself when she was approached to do a children’s colouring book. She said she’d love to – but only if it was for adults. It was an idea that had long been brewing at the back of her mind, particularly since many an art director had joked about how much they’d enjoy sitting down to colour in her work. The publishers agreed, and by the time Evie was five months old, Johanna had sold her first million copies. “It was a real passion project. I didn’t think I’d sell a lot of books, I didn’t even want to,” she says. “I just wanted to be selfish and make the most beautiful book I could.”
“I think it’s because it came at a time when social media was at its peak and everyone was exhausted by it and wanted a digital detox. Ironically, social media has helped the category to bloom, because once you’ve spent that time unplugged doing an analogue activity, you want to share your creations. So you can be sitting anywhere in the world, take a picture and share your masterpiece.” For Johanna, who otherwise would lead a fairly solitary life as an artist, it has led to her studio being opened up to the world, an unexpected side effect she loves. “I see all my books as a collaboration,” she says. “My job is to create the outlines, but it’s not finished until someone brings it to life with colour. It’s like a giant game of consequences.”
One person Johanna wishes could have seen the success of her books is her paternal grandmother, Joan, the only other artistic member of her family. “She was a hobby textile artist and painter, who loved to draw and paint flowers, and there’s definitely a ribbon of her through everything I do,” says Johanna. “When she wasn’t doing her own work, she’d go out with her spotter’s guide books and, as she found each
flower, she’d paint the black and white illustration in the book with watercolour, and then press the flower inside.” This hobby having first seeded the idea of adult colouring books in her granddaughter’s mind, Joan sadly died before the first book was published. “She knew it was happening but never got to see the finished book, which was sad because she would have loved it,” says Johanna, her voice thickening slightly with emotion. “But I inherited her sewing box and her botanical library, and a lot of the things from her studio. I have her compass and protractor; I like the idea that they are still being used.”
Since becoming a mother herself, life has certainly changed for Johanna, and so has her outlook. “My expectations of what I can achieve have certainly shifted,” she says. “Before, I’d be annoyed if I didn’t complete my to-do list, but now, if I get halfway through, we all have clean clothes and there’s a meal on the table, it’s a raging success,” she laughs. “I don’t shout about all the failures I’ve had, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t happened. You just have to learn as fast as you can, and make sure you don’t make the same mistake twice. It’s all about resiliency, tenacity and, when you get knocked back, firing straight back in.”
The hardest part for Johanna, though, is the business and admin side that comes with her creative work, which she admits can prove a real challenge. “Recently I was approaching meltdown level, and needed a drastic solution, so now I only check email once a week (on a Thursday, should you need to know). I do have a smart phone but I hate it. My friends are always complaining that they can never get hold of me because, unless it’s ringing, I never look at it.” That’s another reason Johanna loves this time of year. “It’s the only time you can turn off your phone and laptop and know there’s no important emails coming in, because at Christmas there’s this unwritten rule that everyone’s off. Plus, in our corner of the world there’s often a lot of snow, and because we live down a farm track, we can quite easily become snowed in. You can usually walk out of course, but why would you? johannabasford.com