Jon McTavish, author and illustrator

Jon McTavish is the artist behind Hideaway Tales. He illustrated Drift: Journey to Mount Chilly, wrote the story with his sister Rebecca, and invented the Hideaway Book, the parent book with a hidden phone compartment that ships alongside it. Hideaway Tales is a one-person studio. Jon founded it and runs it alone, from the art to the writing to the business.

Fifteen years of making things

Jon has worked as an artist, illustrator, and designer for about fifteen years. He holds a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University in Toronto and an Art Fundamentals certificate from Sheridan College. His career has covered a lot of ground: creative director at a medical marketing company, freelance illustration, murals in Toronto, set decoration and prop building for film, and years of comic-style digital art and video game work. Before Drift, he illustrated a children's book about a young yeti family learning to snowboard.

A fantasy thread runs through everything he makes. He works in bold line work, bright colour, and dense, patterned detail, whether he is painting in acrylic, drawing on an iPad, or building something enormous. He has carved tree trunks into animal forms and built twelve-foot bonfire dragons out of scrap wood, made to be admired and then burned.

How Drift was made

Drift the dragon started with the big yellow chairs in Jon's living room. He kept imagining one of them as a cozy, egg-shaped dragon, and the character grew from there. The story came together with Rebecca, who had just become a mother and was reading stacks of board books to her daughter. Together they wrote a rhyming adventure about a band of young dragons climbing toward ice cream at the top of Mount Chilly, while Drift, the sleepiest of the group, keeps sneaking off for naps in the silliest places.

Jon noticed that very few books for the youngest readers borrow anything from comics, so he gave Drift dynamic, comic-style paneling and a sense of movement that board books rarely have. He also packed the pages with small details, so a child can find something new on the fiftieth read.

The studio

Jon works from a studio at The Cotton Factory, a shared artist space in Hamilton, Ontario. That is where Drift was illustrated, where the Hideaway Book was designed, and where the next stories in the Hideaway Tales world are taking shape.

Where to find Jon's work