Leo & Diane Dillon – these wonderful artists have illustrated over forty books and won two Cadelkott medals
Leo’s parents are from Trinidad. Diane was born in California 11 days after him. They met at the Parson School of Design in New York in the early fifties. Both very talented, they immediately became rivals. Which did not stop them from getting married four years later and working together for over forty years.

They experimented with the most unusual illustration techniques – acrylic on acetate film, embroidery, wood carving, making stained glass from plastic and covering their works with stencils. Work for them is an eternal surprise, because it is one thing to agree verbally, and quite another to see exactly how the other imagined the image.

After discussing the text and developing ideas and concepts, they begin to draw the outline of the future illustration. The work changes hands many times, both work on each tiny piece – and it is no longer known who exactly made these or those lines. They claim that the illustrations belong to a certain being, which they call “the third artist”, because neither of them could draw something like this on their own. The “third artist” is quite efficient and communicative even if the husband and wife Leo and Diana quarrel and do not talk. At the beginning of their careers, they were worried about losing their individual personalities, but over time they began to feel quite comfortable in the image of the “third”.