Dragon Art by Graeme Base

Graeme Base is a British-born Australian author and illustrator of picture books. He was born in 1958 in Amersham, England, and moved to Australia with his family when he was eight.

Base became widely known with Animalia (1986), an alphabet book packed with hidden objects and intricate detail. He followed it with an illustrated edition of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky (1987), which gave the poem's fearsome beast a vivid new look, and with The Eleventh Hour, a picture-book mystery that was a joint winner of the Children's Book Council of Australia's Picture Book of the Year. Other books include The Sign of the Seahorse and The Worst Band in the Universe.

For dragon lovers, his most important book is The Discovery of Dragons (1996). It presents itself as a collection of letters from explorers who encountered dragons around the world, with each region's dragons painted in rich, playful detail. Base later returned to the idea with The Discovery of Dragons: New Research Revealed (2007).

His style is detailed and inventive, full of humor, texture, and small surprises that reward a second and third look. Even his most impressive dragons tend to have a twinkle of personality, which makes his pictures a favorite with readers of all ages.