Sometimes when I wake up, I find my hair has taken on the look of Terry Wogan's hair. I get a cold about once a month. Whenever I meet up with my friend Heidi I am always exactly 15 minutes late (but she is always there looking cross.)I mostly wear brown and when people bump into me in the street they often say I look like I just woke up.
What else?
When I was six I drew three versions of Cinderella on a big stack of scrap paper, and when I got bored of that I drew faces on the wall. It was a bit tricky as we had woodchip wall paper and I couldn't find a pencil sharpener anywhere, but it was good fun and didn't involve exercise.
In 1996 I went to the University of Westminster where I drank a whole load of bad coffee from vending machines and sometimes went for months without eating a vegetable. And by the end of the three years I'd developed a kind of a inky, smudgy style of telling stories and got myself an illustration degree.
I moved back to Brighton to be with my band (Ska-gal and The Hands of Ra,) and began working in a kitchen of a restaurant. As well as paying me money to keep me in records and pies, it turned out to fuel my storytelling as the bunch of people I worked with had the same love of the sound of their own voices as I did. I began to keep picture diaries and produced a few small picture books which I photocopied and sold.
After a two day tour of Belgium with the band (we played at a huge outdoor festival where we turned out to be the warm up act for some men dressed a Smurfs) I put on an exhibition of my work at a local café. It went well, and made me realize however, that the work I love best is words and pictures combined. Lucky for me Brighton University ran and M.A. course that dealt with just exactly that.
About this time I began to work on a storyboard for a friend's animation. I am a terrible film geek and found it very easy to visualize the motion and pace behind printed words; to have pauses where nothing happens and pages with incidental back ground characters, stuff like this.
I was also discovering a few artists working in a traditional comic format, but telling stories that were gripping and real and dragged me in like a film might; Daniel Clowes and Julie Doucet, just so good it made me sick.
And this together with the storyboarding gave me a new way to work. By the time I began my M.A. I put my pen on the page and the story just plopped out. This story was Charlie Crackers, and by the end of the course I had made prototypes for this and two other books.
I am working on new stories as we speak...
