By day Charley has worked as a make-up artist, a window dresser, a coffee maker, a fetcher of lunch and a shampooer of hair, but by night Charley has always been an illustrator.
Starting small, she printed her characters onto greeting cards and sold them to shops during her lunch breaks. Charley loved the challenge of capturing a customer's heart and telling a story with just one image on a tiny card. From there she built a full time business, eventually getting her range of cards into retailers like Sellfridges, Designers Guild and over 100 more; but there was a problem.
The characters Charley created for her cards each had an untold story. The sausage dog, for example, didn't just want to send birthday greetings, he had adventures to go on! And the fox character, was bored with wishing people a Merry Christmas, he had more interesting tales to tell! As a result, her studio was becoming a very noisy place to work, with everyone talking over each other, trying to get their story told, so you can imagine Charley's relief when she was spotted by Lorna at Bell Lomax Moreton.
Inspired by simple shapes and stories found in everyday life, Charley works with a combination of acrylic, ink and coloured pencils. When she isn't sitting at her desk in her attic studio, she can be found playing Irish fiddle music, listening to true crime podcasts and dreaming of one day visiting Japan.
She lives near the river in the impossibly romantic, story-tale city of Bath with her own two personal cheerleaders; hairy dachshund Doris and husband Adam.