About The Artist

I was born in Ashburton and lived here for the first seventeen years of my life. I then went to Christchurch, where I studied for the Diploma in Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury, graduating in 1976. I then worked as a designer for a couple of years, before travelling to Antarctica, then onto Asia and Europe, before settling in Scotland, where I was gatekeeper at Edinburgh Zoo for two years. During this period I became increasingly interested in writing and illustrating books for children. www.davidelliot.org

On returning to New Zealand in 1984, I resumed work as a designer, but hoping that teaching might afford me more time to follow my interest in books (a vain hope, I'm afraid), I trained to be a teacher, and taught art to secondary students, fulltime, from 1986 to 1998. During this time, while my own two children were still young, the time available to me for writing and illustrating was severely limited and this is reflected in my creative output - three picture books, plus book covers and some illustrating for educational books.

Since 1998, however, with the support of my wife, I have been working fulltime on my own writing and illustrating and, as a result, I have been able to take on an increasing amount of illustration work.

When I was a little boy, my grandfather told me there was a wolf in the plantation, opposite his farm in Mayfield. I have been trying to draw it ever since.