Anita grew up in Cleveland, where she became a high school teacher and met future husband Mark Nelson while she was working on her Masters in Art Education at Case Western Reserve. “My Saturday afternoons as a kid were spent watching old movies on TV,” Anita says. “The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone was a favorite. A story about mysterious murders taking place on the foggy moors filled my childhood need for being creeped out. Today, older and marginally wiser, it takes a little more to creep me out but I am still a sucker for Victorian period pieces—stories,
costumes and art.” Anita’s work appeared in Rosebud 19, which featured her illustrations of Aesop’s Fables, and she also co-illustrated The Best of Rosebud with Mark. Her painting in Graphic Classics: Arthur Conan Doyle was based on the first of the famous “Cottingley fairy photos” promoted in print and lecture by Doyle. “This is something Doyle and I have in common,” admits Anita. “In my childhood I was a lover of Disney films, and I thought Tinkerbell
did a great job playing herself in Peter Pan.”