Dona Turner is an artist and an illustrator. Her job is to take ideas and words and make a picture out of them — this really gives her great pleasure. As an illustrator she creates artwork and images for all kinds of organizations and people, and for all sorts of purposes. Dona loves color and infuses her work with as much of it as she can. Until recently all her illustrations were created by hand using colored pencils, pencil, and pastel. She has an unorthodox methodology—the artist develops an interpretation or idea by first sketching ideas at her table, but she creates the final illustration in the same way she works on her fine art paintings—by standing while she forms the colors and the final image while taping paper to a wall. She enjoys the physical movement of creating artwork by hand and says that standing allows her to move around the artwork, in and out, back and forth. Standing up also allows her to open her heart— she can stretch while she works, she can dance, she’s not bound by her the position of her body (sitting in a chair).
Dona has more than 60 images published as lithograph prints and has recently written a children’s picture book. She’s illustrated the book using Adobe Illustrator. Her works have been licensed for greeting cards, a variety of home decor items, and surface design applications. She teaches Graphic Design in San Francisco at the University of California Berkeley Extension. Her illustration work also includes toy packaging, CD ROM format, illustrations for software products, educational textbooks and posters, and editorial illustration.
