Angela Boyle

Angela focuses on the natural world: the plants and animals we can see and interact with, or at least potentially interact with.



Angela has always been surrounded by animals and enjoyed their company. She was born two weeks after her parent’s borzoi, Domino, birthed a litter. Her parents then bought a house in the county (it came with a cow) and quickly filled the land with their remaining borzois, horses, a pony, chickens, turkeys, and other animals over the years. She played with the frogs and tadpoles in their pond where the great blue herons liked to visit. And she was already passionate about drawing.

 

In 2000, Angela started school at the University of Washington with the intention of graduating from the Aeronautical/Astronautical department. When push came to shove, she got a B.S. in Technical Communication, which was still in the engineering department. After graduating in 2004, she got an “exciting” job as a technical writer for government financial software. She began reading webcomics during lunch at work, namely Penny Arcade, and she rediscovered her love of art. She started drawing again.

 

There was no turning back. In 2011, she started taking art classes left and right. She learned new techniques and continued working on old techniques. Down a long and winding road, Angela eventually came upon the Natural Science Illustration certificate program at the University of Washington. This program pulled together her technical communication and art skills in a way she hadn’t thought of before. Technical communication is about organizing information, typically in written form, to help readers understand a complex topic. Scientific illustration is the art-based version of this same idea.

 

In 2016, Angela graduated from The Center for Cartoon Studies with an MFA (in Vermont). While attending graduate school, she started a job at Chelsea Green Publishing, finally able to use all her skills for good. Now back home in Washington State she is editing, writing, and drawing. She has shared her skills at Western Washington University and around the county, teaching illustration and comics classes. For a time, she also worked at the Ferndale Public Library. Amazing as it was, she left to work more inside books, taking on work as a freelance production assistant and proofreader for Chelsea Green, lettering work and book layout and design for First Second, and writing and editing for Animal Behavior College.

 

Angela’s focused medium is ink, specifically her Carbon Platinum fountain pen or a Hunt 102 dip pen. She enjoys the Zen quality of working with hatch marks. But she also enjoys working in watercolor and colored pencil, and experimenting with new mediums.