‘I decided that if I was going to have no colour in my final collection, I’d better compensate for it by having loads of detail.’ And so her intricate black and white style was born. I can pretty much learn the same skills and I don’t have to be in a basement.’Īs a hard-up student, Johanna couldn’t afford coloured inks for screen printing, so stuck to cheaper black and white. ‘I thought, I’ll spend three years up here. Prince William told me that Kate likes to colour my Secret Garden bookīy the time she reached her teenage years, Johanna knew that she wanted to be an artist, and took up a place at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee, opting for textiles over illustration because the former was taught on the top floor overlooking the River Tay. She would draw on her clothes, her shoes and even on her little sister Katrina. After that, she says, it was open season for graffiti. He left it in the hall and I used it to do a big wall mural of scribbles in our hallway.’ And rather than be angry about her childhood vandalism, her parents left the mural in pride of place until they moved out of the house. ‘My dad had this tin of black, tar-like paint for sealing the underneath of the car. Johanna herself was around Evie’s age when her parents (both marine biologists) realised that she was obsessed with drawing. It’s only about eight miles from where she grew up on her parents’ fish farm in the tiny village of Auchnagatt. Johanna herself lives in a converted farmhouse with husband James Watt (the co-founder of Scottish craft beer company BrewDog) and their two young children, Evie, three, and six-month-old Mia. I don’t think it matters whether you live in a castle or a caravan.’ I get so many emails from mums who colour when they’re having a bit of downtime. ‘And when you think about it, Kate’s just another mum with young kids. ‘He said, “My wife’s really excited that I’m meeting you today,” and told me she liked to colour my Secret Garden book,’ recalls Johanna. Her books would go soaring up the Amazon bestseller lists, earn her an OBE and gain her celebrity fans including (and she got this from Prince William himself at the investiture) the Duchess of Cambridge. When Johanna, 34, published her first colouring book for adults back in 2013, she could hardly have known she was about to ignite a global craze so addictive that it would cause pencil shortages. Johanna receiving her OBE from Prince William last year
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