Penny Dann, who has died of cancer aged 50, was a prolific illustrator of children’s books, with a humorous and vivacious style. Her work appeared in numerous anthologies and in individual picture books by a wide range of authors; she also wrote and illustrated her own series, The Secret Fairy.
Dann’s accessible and child-friendly style was noticed while she was still a student at Brighton College of Art, where she studied visual communication. Some sketches in the back of a book were spotted by her tutor, Raymond Briggs, who encouraged her to develop her character drawings, and these became the basis of her later work. At the end-of-degree show, Penny’s extended piece of work about tea was picked out by the Artworks agency, and published as One for the Pot in 1985.
Although One for the Pot was not for children, Penny’s work, with its strong line drawings and realistic people, was quickly identified as being perfect for the burgeoning preschool market. In the following years, drawing on that style and developing it into more mixed media and gouache, Penny created the covers and the inside illustrations for a great many books of rhyme and song, including John Agard and Grace Nichols’s anthology of poems No Hickory, No Dickory, No Dock (1991) and some non-fiction, such as David Bellamy’s How Green Are You? (1991). One of her bestselling titles was The Orchard Book of Nursery Rhymes for Your Baby (2010).
After several years of illustrating traditional stories and rhymes, and work by others, Penny created The Secret Fairy. The series began with The Secret Fairy Handbook (1997), a carefully conceived primer full of tips for any girl dreaming of one day becoming a fairy, and the first of 15 titles that sold more than 2m copies around the world.
She continued to illustrate picture books, the most recent being Polly Parrot Picks a Pirate (2014), written by Peter Bently. However simple the book, she had the highest standards for it. Her long-time editor Kate Burns described Penny as a delight to work with: “She never missed a deadline. Her way of working was meticulous, methodical and organised. She was a unique draughtswoman who was undoubtedly more gifted as a fine artist than people perhaps realise.”
The older daughter of Julian Dann, an architect, and his wife, Jill, Penny was born in Slough, Berkshire, and was educated at Burnham grammar school, Buckinghamshire, and Brighton College of Art. After graduating, she remained in Brighton, where she played an active part in the monthly meetings of the Brighton Illustrators Group. Between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, she lived in Australia, in Sydney then Melbourne, but continued to work for London-based publishers.
After returning to the UK, through the Brighton Illustrators Group she met Tom Sanderson, a book designer, whom she married a few days before her death. She is survived by Tom, her parents and a younger sister, Jackie.
• Penny Dann, children’s writer and illustrator, born 30 June 1964; died 20 December 2014
