Back to articles & videos

Illustrator Spotlight – Tonia Composto

Sound Waves Reading 25/8/22

Graphic designer, printmaker and storyteller are just a few of the titles Tonia Composto has gone by throughout her career as an artist.

The past 8 years have seen Tonia slowly moving all of her art and design skills into the world of illustration through a variety of mediums.

Tonia’s bold and gritty style takes inspiration from ancient cultural art and tribal retro vibes. She describes her style as one that can sometimes be neat and clean, and other times messy and chaotic.

Since joining The Illustration Room in 2019, the Melbourne-based illustrator has contributed her unique style to several of our Sound Waves Decodable Readers including My House, Sid and Moon Tooth.

Her favourite book Sid is about a pig named Sid that loves to eat. Tonia enjoyed the challenge of adjusting her usual style to something more suited to early childhood illustration.

‘Creating simple illustrations to tell a story is harder than you think and it’s the simplicity of Sid that I really enjoy,’ she said.

Another Decodable Reader Tonia had fun working on was Moon Tooth, which is about a creature who flies to a moon and gets a flat tyre on its moon buggy.

‘When creating the scenes for this book I would catch myself giggling at times, because the situation was so bizarre and the character was so funny and odd.’

Tonia has enjoyed working with Firefly Education as she feels her styles and ideas were welcomed.

‘Working on the Firefly projects has been awesome! For us to do our job properly we need to be trusted to produce a great illustration,’ she said.

‘Big credit to the authors, I can see the time and energy that go into these stories. Using simple language to tell a story isn’t easy and takes critical thinking and skill.’

See more of Tonia’s work on her website or Instagram.

More Sound Waves Reading articles & videos