Marc McBride is the illustrator of the New York Times best-selling series Deltora Quest, which has sold over eighteen million copies around the world and has become an Anime TV show.
Marc has illustrated more than two hundred book covers including the Dragon Games series by Maddy Mara. He has illustrated ten picture books including The Glimme written by Emily Rodda (Honour Book in the 2020 CBCA awards), The Song of Lewis Carmichael (2021), The House on Pleasant Street (2022), The Glow (2023) and A Friend for Ruby (2023), all written by Sofie Laguna, and published by Allen and Unwin.
Marc has had work exhibited with the New York Society of Illustrators International Show and has won Aurealis Awards for the Deltora Quest series and World of Monsters, which he wrote and illustrated.
During the presentation Marc will talk about the relationship between pictures and words in a book. He will explain colour theory, light, shape, line and texture- the five elements of visual language as he paints a character from one of his books getting ideas from the audience.
Focusing on creativity and imagination, using simple shapes, Marc encourages the students to draw with him and to ‘not be afraid of making mistakes’- after-all it is often a mistake in a drawing that becomes the inspiration for something truly original!
Every student will create their own artwork and the school gets to keep the finished painting.
Testimonials
The Song of Lewis Carmichael
The House on Pleasant Street
The Glow
Rowan of Rin: The Journey (30th Anniversary Edition)
A Friend for Ruby
Featured Speakers
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Welome to 2025
Hope that everyone has had a relaxing break.
Don't forget to check out the Touring Speakers page as we have lots of speakers on the move this year.
We look forward to hearing from you soon!
New Releases See all books
Touring Speakers See all tour dates
| Speaker | Location | Tour dates | Book now |
|---|---|---|---|
Brisbane / Gold Coast / Sunshine Coast | 18 Mar - 20 Mar 2025 | ||
Brisbane | 25 Mar - 28 Mar 2025 | ||
Canberra | 27 Mar - 28 Mar 2025 | ||
Melbourne | 26 Apr - 29 Apr 2025 | ||
Sydney | 30 Apr - 02 May 2025 |
What people are saying
Josie was very well received for her generous and genuine talk about what it is to be a writer and how to get started. The students, teachers and parents from the Fascinate writing program really responded to Josie's talk
We all thought the session was brilliant and as you could see the children were thoroughly engaged.
We had six virtual sessions with Chris, spread across two different days. I appreciated that he took on feedback I delivered from the first days sessions and applied this to the latter three sessions. Applying the feedback brought some more structure to the sessions and allowed the students to learn more about Chris and his practice, which showed them why the workshop was relevant and why he was a relevant person to deliver the workshop (as opposed to the same prompts coming from their teachers) [...]
Brett was an outstanding speaker. He nailed the balance between important information coupled with solid research, industry experience, stories, and humour. He was relatable and engaging. We would like to book him every year. Next year for the students as well as the parents.
Speakers Ink makes it easy for me to locate and engage quality authors for our Book Week program
The girls were so interested hearing Gabrielle speak. She was engaging, interesting, and we all thought she was so, so talented. Was a treat for us to have her.
Chrissy's experience as a teacher was very obvious... she was able to handle large groups with aplomb... she engaged all listeners and presented valuable information about the writing/illustrating and publishing processes.
Concluding Book Week, today our students enjoyed a visit from Author; Milly Reynolds and Illustrator; Simon Deshon aka Siggo, who together created the book "St Sebastian, Jack & the Silver Lining". Their book is about friendship, loyalty, accepting differences and finding silver linings. Students from K to 6 were engaged with writing and drawing workshops with Milly & Siggo, who read the story to them, explained the steps of creating a story and then showed them how to create expressions on cha [...]
Wonderful, warm and engaging. Well done Lorraine - looking forward to having you back again!
Our students enjoyed an interactive and fun-filled session with Kristin Darell. The talk was so beautifully designed to suit the needs of our students and was thoroughly enjoyed by our whole Primary school community. Students really enjoyed learning about her writing and character development process, teachers also found it so valuable in the way she directly supported classroom learning about writing. Kristin also shared about her life journey as a writer which made it personal, interesting and [...]
Victoria was great with our students. She worked with them to build their ideas and to express themselves creatively. The students thoroughly enjoyed her presentation and she was very generous with her time when they had a lot of questions.
Sue exceeded expectations. She was brilliant and received great feedback from our participants. Thank you for your service. It is great to work with such an organised team.