Lisa Aisato: Illustrator – Norway

lisa aisato was born in 1981 and grew up in Oppegård, just outside of Oslo. She works as an illustrator, author, and artist. Having started as an illustrator of children’s books, she now writes her own books as well as illustrating for other authors. She made her debut as an author in 2008 with the picture book My Two Great Grandmothers, inspired by her own heritage with a Norwegian mother and a Gambian father. Her background makes her understand otherness from a different perspective—a feeling that is important to convey through children’s books, regardless of cultural background. In her own books, she also lifts strangeness or otherness from a cultural context up to a more general and symbolic level. “Odd” is a common Norwegian name for boys, but it is no coincidence that she chose that for her egg-boy in Odd Is an Egg. She manages to maintain high artistic quality as well as appeal to children; this makes her fans range from scholars and critics to small children.

Aisato mixes many different techniques in her illustrations; she uses chalk, pencil, watercolor, ink, and gouache painting to capture the expressions of the different characters in her illustrations. She is considered as having a unique ability to capture the moods in texts by other authors at the same time as having the literary imagination to expand on the empty spaces in a text. The images in Odd Is an Egg are made with the distinctive technique that Aisato has developed which combines the best parts of the hand-drawn and the digital. She works with ink and gouache painting on a stretched and unprimed cotton canvas that soaks up the paint and the ink. She then takes a picture of the canvas and keeps working on it in Photoshop. Even after processing the canvas the structure is visible, giving the images a tactile and sensitive quality.

Although Lisa Aisato has only been working as an illustrator for seven years, she has developed her own unique technique that distinguishes her from other illustrators. She has been nominated for several prizes, such as the Critics prize for best children’s book for A fish Called Luna in 2015 and for Odd Is an Egg in 2010. Aisato has also been awarded the Bookstores’ scholarship for children’s literature in 2011. In 2010, 2012, and 2014, she was nominated for the Brage prize.