‘I am very serious about being silly’: children’s illustrators on the art of storytelling

From The Twits to The Gruffalo and an angry bear in search of his hat… Quentin Blake, Cressida Cowell, Axel Sheffler, Lauren Child and more reveal how they bring children’s books to lifeSpread across a sprawling 17th-century industrial complex in London’s Clerkenwell, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which opens next month, is being billed as the largest institution of its kind anywhere in the world: a permanent national home for an art form that shapes everything from children’s books and political cartoons to animation, fashion, advertising and digital culture. Part museum, part gallery and part creative laboratory, the centre represents an extraordinary attempt to drag illustration out of the margins and finally place it at the heart of British cultural life.Eventually the centre will become home to Blake’s own enormous archive: 40,000 drawings created by one of the UK’s best-known and most immediately recognisable artists. Now 93, Blake has