Steve Cox is an award-winning, professional illustrator living in the UK.
He has worked extensively in children's publishing, character design and
licensing.
Steve Cox was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire and then moved to Caversham near Reading before his family moved to Cornwall when he was aged ten.
He sketched and painted his way through his school years but it wasn’t until he had to make a decision about college that he started to think about drawing for a living.
Faced with a basic choice of Fine Art or Graphic Design, Steve chose the latter and spent four years at Cornwall College of Art, graduating with a distinction and the letters S.I.A.D (Society of Industrial Artists and Designers) after his name.
He was also playing bass guitar in a band at the time which eventually took him to Bristol and Bath where he began working for a small design company. It was here that Steve suddenly found himself in the world of toy packaging and children’s TV character merchandising, where his drawing and visualising skills were put to the test creating illustrations and concept drawings for all manner of packaging and licensed products.
The TVAM character, Roland Rat was on the up at the time and the design company he was working for became heavily involved in producing design and illustration for the huge amount of merchandising that was being produced.
Steve personally became the ‘approved Roland Rat artist’ which in turn took him to London and further into the world of character merchandising. Whilst living in London he joined forces with a leading licensing company to make a joint pitch to handle all of the licensing and product design for what was Cosgrove Hall and Thames Television’s biggest ever animation series – Count Duckula.
The pitch was a huge success and he was able to set up his own design and illustration company which would specialise in design and illustration for many well known children’s TV and film characters and as the company grew it became the approved studio for many of them.
Although the company was a success, Steve decided that he really wanted to return to the drawing board full-time and concentrate on his own illustration rather than remain as an art director.
Now, several years later, he has had his work published in hundreds of books all over the world. He has produced artwork for many, varied projects from simple board books to highly complex and detailed pop-up models which he has developed with his friend Nick Denchfield, the very talented paper engineer.
In 2006 Steve’s very first 'proper'picture book, Pigs Might Fly, written by Jonathan Emmett, won the 'Books For Younger Children' category of the Red House Children's Book Award and they are currently busy working on another which features a crocodile pirate and his sea-dog submarine crew.
Recently Steve has returned to live and work in Bath and he’s also taken up making music again, playing lead guitar in a rock covers band called The Atomic Rays who can be found regularly playing in and around Bristol.
Steve Cox
Bath
North Somerset
United Kingdom
Phone: +44(0)1225 421146
Email:
stevecox.uk@gmail.com
