In July 1932, Rosa Breithaupt Hewetson bought a forty-acre property on the Scarborough Bluffs and, together with her new husband H. Spencer Clark, began converting it into something Toronto had never quite seen before. In 1932, H. Spencer and Rosa Clark established an artist collective, the Guild of All Arts, on the Scarborough Bluffs, which focused on their interests in arts and crafts, health and nutrition, alternative education, and co-operative movements. They converted stables and garages into studio and workshop space for artists and artisans to live and work in. The result was, for a time, the most genuinely strange and productive creative address in the city's east end. I think about it whenever someone asks me whether you need a fine-art degree to make picture books for a living. You don't. You never have. But the question is worth sitting with properly.
What Scarborough built first
In the middle of the Great Depression, Rosa and H. Spencer Clark opened the Guild of All Arts in Scarborough. They had a vision of building a self-sufficient artists cooperative, where artists and craftspeople could live, work and create. Two notable artists who worked at the Guild of All Arts at some point were English sculptor Dorothy Dick and Hungarian-born Torontonian Nicholas Hornyansky. The point, for our purposes, is not the celebrity list. It is the model. The Guild was explicitly anti-credentialist. You came because you could make things, not because you had studied making things at the right institution. It took a few years for The Guild of All Arts to take off, but by the late 1930s the property had become popular enough that the Clarks built a number of additions. They moved out of the main residence and added dormitories to house even more artists and craftspeople.
That spirit did not evaporate when the site eventually became a public park. Another building, used for storage and offices by the Clarks, was expanded to three storeys and now houses the Clark Centre for the Arts. It has programs of art classes and artist exhibits. Scarborough kept insisting, in its understated way, that making art is a practice before it is a qualification.
The Toronto self-taught line
Debbie Ridpath Ohi is probably the clearest example in Canadian picture books of what a non-linear path actually looks like close up. Debbie Ridpath Ohi is a writer and illustrator living in Toronto. Armed with a B.Sc. in computer science and psychology from the University of Toronto, Ohi began working for a bank as a systems programmer/analyst. Soon, she changed direction and focused on writing, teaching piano, and illustration. No fine-art school. No illustration degree. She taught herself, kept sketchbooks, and published a note in her own Substack that is about as honest as this territory gets: "Before I begin, I need to point out that I have no formal art training."
What followed that admission is not a cautionary tale. Debbie Ridpath Ohi's writing or art has appeared in over twenty books for young people. She is the award-winning author and illustrator of Where Are My Books?, I Want to Read ALL the Books, and Sam & Eva with Simon & Schuster. She illustrated I'm Bored, a picture book written by Michael Ian Black, and it ended up being chosen as a New York Times Notable Children's Book that year. The bank job is now a footnote.
There is a parallel further back in the Toronto illustration tradition. Todd Stewart is a self-taught printmaker and film-maker, and an illustrator and author of picture books. Silkscreen techniques are an integral part of his illustration process and he incorporates them in all of his book projects. Todd co-manages a collective print studio and runs silkscreen and illustration workshops for children, youth and adults at his studio and in schools, galleries, local business, libraries and artist-run centres. Stewart was the Toronto Public Library's Illustrator in Residence, a program that honours the memory of illustrator Joanne Fitzgerald (1956-2011). Two self-taught practitioners, one named residency: that is not a coincidence so much as a recurring fact about how picture-book illustration actually gets made.
What the credential question is really asking
When people ask whether they need art school to illustrate picture books, they are usually asking two different things at once. The first is about technical skill. The second is about permission. The technical question has a practical answer. You don't even have to have traditional art school training, though years of practice helps. You just need a quality body of work that you love to make that people also happen to like. The portfolio is the credential. It always was.
The permission question is harder and more personal, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There is a specific kind of loneliness to working in a home studio in Scarborough, or Agincourt, or Malvern, without the built-in cohort that a graduate program provides. Illustrator Elina Ellis, who later did earn a master's in children's book illustration at Cambridge School of Art, put the value of that experience plainly: "The greatest benefit of my Master's in Illustration wasn't the technical training, it was the community. Being surrounded by other creative people, sharing ideas, seeing different approaches, and learning from each other. That kind of environment is incredibly enriching and hard to replicate on your own." She also said something worth quoting in full: "I truly believe it's possible to become a successful illustrator without formal education, especially today. There are so many high-quality online resources available now, you can learn at your own pace and focus on the specific skills you want to develop."
The community gap is real. The skill gap is closeable. Those are two separate problems and it helps to treat them that way.
How a self-taught studio actually works
From where I sit at Albion Press, watching illustrators come up through very different routes, a few habits show up consistently in the ones who make the work stick.
The first is the private sketchbook. Ohi has written about this directly. Keep a creative notebook and draw regularly. She has many different types of sketchbooks, both on paper and digital, and draws in them constantly. Especially if beginning or lacking confidence, draw just for yourself, not for posting publicly. The compulsion to perform newness on social media is the enemy of the messy middle work that actually builds a visual vocabulary.
The second is deliberate copying, done privately. Copying other artists' work is one of the best ways to learn. Don't share it publicly, this is purely for your education. Pick your favourite illustrators and try to recreate their work. Pay attention to how they use composition, line, and colour. This is how illustrators learned before art schools existed, and it still works.
The third is reading picture books the way a writer reads fiction: forensically. Study illustrated children's books you love the way you'd study anything else you were trying to learn, page by page, asking why a particular scene works. The thirty-two-page format has its own grammar, and that grammar is sitting on the shelf at every Toronto Public Library branch.
The fourth is getting honest feedback before sending work out. You'll improve faster if you let other people see your work and give honest feedback. Ask other illustrators, agents, or art directors for a quick opinion. SCBWI Canada East runs portfolio days. The Canadian Children's Book Centre has programming. The Joanne Fitzgerald Illustrator in Residence program at Toronto Public Library, a joint program of IBBY Canada, Toronto Public Library, the Canadian Urban Libraries Council, and the Young Family, is exactly the kind of public infrastructure a self-taught illustrator should know about and use.
The Scarborough angle, specifically
I keep coming back to place because place is not incidental. The Guild of All Arts was not in the Annex or Cabbagetown or any of the neighbourhoods that typically appear in Toronto arts origin stories. It was at the end of Kingston Road, on a bluff above the lake, in a part of the city that has always had to make its own case. That particular mix of distance from the centre and proximity to something genuinely beautiful (the bluffs, the lake, the ravines) produces a certain kind of creative stubbornness. You are not waiting to be discovered by a gallery on Queen West. You are in your studio, or your kitchen table, or your converted garage, and you are making the work.
That is, historically, where a lot of Canadian picture books have actually come from. Not from MFA programs, though those have their place. From people who drew a lot, read a lot of picture books carefully, found a few colleagues who would be honest with them, and kept going. The Guild of All Arts understood that in 1932. It is still true now.
If you are a self-taught illustrator in Toronto, and especially if you are working somewhere east of the DVP in a studio that no one outside your postal code has heard of, you are not outside the tradition. You are pretty close to its original address.
Sources
- Toronto Public Library. "Illustrator in Residence: Todd Stewart." Toronto Public Library Programs and Classes. torontopl.ca.
- Toronto Metropolitan University Library. "Debbie Ridpath Ohi." Asian Heritage Author Profiles. library.torontomu.ca, accessed 2026.
- Ohi, Debbie Ridpath. "Picture Books 101 (Part 2): Beginner Tips For Illustrators." Debbie Ohi on Substack. debbieohi.substack.com.
- City of Toronto. "Your Home Our City: The Guild of All Arts." City of Toronto Online Exhibits. toronto.ca, accessed 2026.
- Heritage Toronto. "Art and Innovation at the Guild of All Arts." heritagetoronto.org, accessed 2026.
- National Trust for Canada. "Guild Inn." Top 10 Endangered Places List: 2011. nationaltrustcanada.ca.
- Wheeler, Deborah. "For Illustrators Who Want to Know About Children's Book Publishing." wheelerstudio.com, 17 December 2021.
- Illustrators.com. "How to Learn Illustration Without Going to Art School." illustrators.com, accessed 2026.
- Ellis, Elina. Interview. For Artists on Substack (Interview #37). forartists.substack.com.
Hero image: photo by Venrick Azcueta on Unsplash.