Payne, Adam Sutcliffe

Adam Payne is an artist and illustrator who lives in Petaluma, California, with his wife, Kate Blakeslee, and their three children. He was born in San Francisco in 1966. In 1989 he graduated as a Regent's Scholar from the University of California, Santa Cruz where he majored in American Studies with an emphasis on literature. A year later, he and Kate moved to Segovia, Spain, to teach English and study Spanish. They lived in in a small pueblo for five years. Adam's creative relationship with Nina's poem Four in All began in Spain with the making of a deck of cards comprised of the poem's fifty six words. He used this deck of cards in his English classes and began to construct a pictorial narrative with the editorial guidance of Stephen Roxburgh. After seven years he completed work on Four in All, a picture book in cut-paper collage. For over ten years Adam has been making handmade books with pictures made out of cut paper. Today, he supplements his work as a children's book illustrator with commercial illustration and graphic design.OCTOBER 30