Illustrator Research #15- Phyllis Pollema-Cahill

Phyllis Pollema-Cahill grew up in Minnesota. The summer after her high school graduation, she was offered a position as an assistant artist in a small design studio. At the time, she was signed up to attend an art school in California, but decided to postpone her college education and soon was learning about camera-ready art, rapidographs and rubber cement. That was the beginning of a 15-year career as a graphic artist. She later received her degree in illustration from Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in Denver, Colorado. She has been illustrating full-time for children since December 1995.

Some of her clients have been Brown Publishing, ChariotVictor Books, Discovery Trails, Faces, Guide Magazine, Guideposts for Kids, Hampton-Brown, Harcourt School Division, Highlights for Children, Holt Reinhart, Houghton Mifflin/Great Source, International Bible Society, Jack and Jill, Lifeway Christian Resources, Mazer Corp., McGraw-Hill/Macmillan, and McGraw-Hill/SRA.


She uses watercolors on all of her work; her work method involves layering paint and a few other mediums until she adds a final layer of watercolors.


I like her work's soft colors in general. In the way she uses the watercolors seems right for maybe stories set several decades or a century ago, as the soft sense maybe gives some sense of history or rememberance to it.

Her website is located here: http://www.phylliscahill.com/