Background
Aitchison was born in Birmingham.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Martin Aitchison
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated at Ellesmere College in Shropshire, leaving aged 15 to attend the Birmingham School of Art and then Slade School of Artist
Career
He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1939. He was deaf, excluding him from active service in the Second World War, but he worked for Vickers Aircraft as a technical illustrator. He produced drawings for the bouncing bomb designed by Barnes Wallis for the Dam Busters air raid.
He became a freelance commercial artist after the war, producing drawings for a range of magazines.
His earliest work was for Hulton Press" Lilliput magazine. He drew for Girl, filling in for Ray Bailey on "Kitty Hawke and her All-Girl Air Crew", and illustrating "Flick and the Vanishing New Girl" in the first Girl annual.
He began to work for the Eagle in 1952, drawing the French Foreign Legion strip "Luck of the Legion", written by Geoffrey Bond, for nearly ten years, including spin-off strips in American Broadcasting Company Film Review in 1952. His work for comics displayed his talents in an exuberant and creative medium, working mainly from imagination.
He joined Ladybird Books in 1963, and joined Harry Wingfield in illustrating many titles in its new Key Words Reading Scheme books, also known as Peter and Jane, which were used to teach so many British children to read.
The consistency, naturalistic style and attention to detail of the artist made him a favourite with the prolific British publisher and over a period of a quarter of a century, he illustrated at least 100 different titles. Martin Aitchison was not the only artist to make the switch from The Eagle to Ladybird. Frank Hampson and Frank Humphris also followed the same pathological
