Her stark black-and-white drawings, often with highly detailed content, became her trademark when she began illustrating books for other authors in 1924. Helen Sewell first earned her living as a designer of Christmas and greeting cards. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The result was Sewell’s distinctive, highly stylized illustration technique, which often utilized hard-lined ink sketches, no shadowing, and close-in focus on characters. Sewell was the youngest student to be admitted to art classes at Pratt Institute in New York City and continued to study art intermittently, including a stint with the Russian sculptor Aleksandr Archipenko. Orphaned at the age of eight, she lived with a large, extended family that provided her lifelong support and continuous contact with children, which was essential to her career as an illustrator. Helen Sewell spent a portion of her early childhood on Guam, where her father was governor. She cited such disparate images as volcanoes glowing in the night, camels near the Suez Canal, and the varying colors of the oceans as stimulating her first artistic tendencies. By the age of seven, Sewell had circumnavigated the globe. One of the busiest artists at work in the field of children’s illustration during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, Helen Moore Sewell had a lifelong interest in depicting the world around her that was rooted in early travel experiences.
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