Taking a journey through Faerieland with artist Sally Anne Lambert

An artist renowned for her paintings of small animals, who illustrates children’s books, who moved from the city to enjoy a more rural life, who loves her home in the Lake District where she likes to be among nature… sound familiar?

Having grown up on a diet of Beatrix Potter and being an admirer of her work, Sally Anne Lambert probably wouldn’t be offended by the comparison. Although born in different eras their lives have too many parallels to ignore; living in Hawkshead, Sally is even in the next village along from Beatrix’s home at Sawrey.

In their work, their shared fascination and ability for observing the natural world in the tiniest detail; their characters, full of minute details that bring enormous character to a creature’s expression; the contexts of putting animals into human situations; the co-existence of realism and fantasy. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that Sally Anne has no Herdwick sheep. Although she does have a rescue rabbit, two cats and a dog.

Many people may be more familiar with her work than they realise, having received or sent one of her greetings cards – elves and faeries dancing in a woodland clearing, Ratty and Mole at Badger’s door one snowy night, two pixies witnessing Father Christmas and his reindeer flying in front of the moon.

As the founder of Moongazer Cards, Sally’s ranges of approximately 200 greetings card designs are sold worldwide, in Japan, Canada and Australia, as well as locally in Beck Steps Gallery, Grasmere, Peter Rabbit and Friends in Hawkshead Square and Hayes Garden World in Ambleside. Now some of her best loved illustrations, and some new ones, have been brought together just in time for Christmas in a 64-page fully illustrated, hardback book of faerie poems, The Way to Faerieland.

It had been a plan for some time, lockdown proved to be the catalyst to make it happen. She had just attended the biggest international trade fair of the year at Birmingham in February. “There was a great feeling of optimism,” she describes. “People were feeling better about the economy and I took a lot of greeting cards orders. Then in March lockdown came. I was still sending orders out but the shops were closed and unable to sell their stock.”

Sally took no new orders for three months, but rather than despair she saw it as “a wonderful opportunity”. The once in a lifetime chance to step off the hamster wheel of creating, printing, marketing, distributing and selling – the routine by which her life usually runs – allowed Sally to turn her attention to her book. Although that should be Sally, and her mum. Maureen Lambert is as much a part of the story as Sally since it is her poems that appear on the back of the cards and receive equal profile in the book. Indeed, Maureen edited the book, choosing the order of the poems and illustrations to take the reader on a journey.

The unique partnership of mother and daughter goes back to when Maureen started to write poems for her grandchildren who wanted to know the stories behind the pictures, grew from there. Sometimes the illustrations came first, sometimes the poems; mostly, they were done for fun, but sometimes to make the children think. For example, the message in The Secrets Faerie is that if someone tells you a secret then it is not yours to tell. Sally started to put the poems on the backs of the cards. Customers loved them, and they became her bestselling range.

Sally says: “People started asking me to do a book and I would say ‘yes, I’m going to do it next year’. That was 15 years ago.

“With a growing business I just didn’t have the time. COVID gave me the time. I knew shops wouldn’t be ordering even once they were open again because it takes a couple of months for them to sell through the stock, so I had at least three months to work on the book.

“I completely indulged myself in it. I couldn’t do the other things I do like horse-riding and running because of the lockdown. It was a wonderful opportunity and I had all summer.”

It also gave her the chance to have a new website built – moongazercards.com – where she can sell her greetings cards, prints, books and wall clocks, among a growing range of new products, to the public. Trade customers can also place online orders that go straight to the printer for production and shipping. Previously Sally took orders, packed and distributed herself.

“My old website stopped working properly last year and I really could have done with it when everything went online in lockdown but at the same time it meant I could concentrate on getting the new one just right,” she says. Now it is ready, her book went online straightaway and the orders started coming in immediately, from as far away as Australia. While time continues to allow, mum and daughter have already started working on book two, which Sally hopes will mark a successful return to Spring Fair 2021 following a year even the faeries could not have foreseen.

Born in Crosby, near Liverpool, art is all the young Sally Anne wanted to do. “I was at my happiest when drawing,” she says. “I was about three when I started and always loved my crayons and felt pens. It was my favourite subject at school and when I left I went straight on to do a foundation course in art.”

Her childhood home was a large Victorian house with a rambling garden where she and her older brother made dens and had adventures. She was not a big reader, preferring to spend her time looking at pictures.

She progressed to study graphic design at Coventry Lanchester University and while on the course, in 1984, she was offered the chance to illustrate The Gingerbread Man by David Wood for Pavilion Books based in Covent Garden, London. The company directors were the chat show presenter Michael Parkinson and Terry Jones of Monty Python fame. “It was all very arty and all the people they dealt with were people in the creative arts. It was a lovely introduction and really helped me get my foot in the door for illustrating children’s books,” explains Sally.

For the next seven years she approached publishers directly. Although interesting and fun, she admits it was also a slog, calling for appointments and taking her portfolio to London on the train in the hope that one of the publishers would have a suitable manuscript to offer her.

When David Wood introduced her to his agent, Lake District-based Eunice McMullen, things got much easier. She was commissioned by major publishers including Bloomsbury and Harper Collins, in the USA, whose book The Story of The Easter Bunny, which Sally illustrated reached number three in the New York Times list of bestselling children’s books that year.

Another of her American successes was Gator Gumbo. “It was so much fun to illustrate. I had to get inside the heads of some very cute looking but nasty little creatures so that you didn’t have much sympathy for them when they got their just deserts.

“I love illustrating animals best, they’re my favourite. I love their facial expressions and I’m very comfortable drawing them.”

In October last year, while recovering from a broken foot, she was able to spend more time drawing and within three months came up with Simple Pleasures, a brand new range of 14 animal character illustrations.

“I’m very slow and meticulous with my initial drawing, as that’s the structure that the rest of the painting forms around,” she says. “A drawing can take about a week to get to the point where I start to add watercolour and finally pencil crayon. A painting often takes two-three weeks to complete even though they are fairly small in size, so it was a nice change to work fast.”

She is also extremely happy drawing foliage.” All I ever used to draw at school was plants and flowers so my default subject is foliage. I especially love drawing twisted tree roots and boughs and my camera is full of photos of strangely shaped gnarled old trees.”

One of her popular cards is a woodland scene, with the main tree portrayed as a bear. “That was a real tree I came across and it really did look like a bear,” she laughs. It wasn’t too big a leap for a neighbouring tree to become an elephant, another to be a chimpanzee.

“I get inspiration from all sorts of places, when I’m out walking the dog,” says Sally. I set off in the morning and start forming the ideas and by the time I get back I will, hopefully, have designed it in my head and planned where the colours are going. I just get into my own world.”

Her style is nostalgic, influenced by Arthur Rackham and Mabel Lucie Attwell, who illustrated within a period known as The Golden Age of Illustration. “I love Arthur Rackham’s gnarled trees, but I didn’t like them as a child. I don’t want to frighten children. I like edgy, but not scary,” she says.

Michael Foreman is another she admires. “I was fascinated by the freshness of his colours. It’s why I love watercolours, for the way the paint plays on different paper. I don’t do any colour work on the computer. I draw freehand then paint in watercolour or work in pencil crayon. With art you can adapt. Because you are using your own imagination it doesn’t matter if you exaggerate proportions and different features of an animal, it all builds the character. They have got to have personality.”

Moongazercards.com

FACES IN THE TREES

When I was walking in the wood,

Beneath the twisted boughs I stood,

And saw the faces in the trees

Of elephants, bears and chimpanzees.

Witches, goblins, faeries, gnomes,

Peering from their ancient homes,

Branches shaped when winds ran free

Blowing round the old, oak tree.

THE SECRETS FAERIE

If you’re told a secret that no one should know

Tell only the Secrets Faerie so.

Our precious secrets the faerie will hide,

She’ll wrap them in tissue with blue ribbons tied.

The neat, little faerie keeps a strong box

With keys made of silver and shiny, gold locks.

When you’re told a secret you must guard it well

For it certainly isn’t your secret to tell.