Sophie Blackall at the annual SCBWI Conference 2013

Sophie Blackall was a keynote speaker at the Western Washington SCBWI annual conference I attended today. Not only was she a funny and entertaining speaker, but I quickly came to admire her work. As she joked, a wombat is a "shapeless" creature so, when she had to illustrate a book about wombats, it was a challenge to distinguish the different wombat characters in the book. It's true! A wombat is not a particularly interesting animal in its physical appearance. Giving individual wombats in the story their own unique personalities would not be an easy task. But she managed to do it!
Check out her book, Wombat Walkabout.