•MORE PRE-DIGITAL WORK

My preferred medium of choice before pixels came along was water colour. Dr Martin's watercolour inks is a fantastic range of brilliant colours and when combined with coloured pencil work they gave me all the freedom and detail I needed to create my first greetings card commissions and posters. Airbrush always played a major role in poster work too. I employed a small variety of styles that included black and white pen work. The brush pens with the rubber tip were excellent for freehand work.

In this set of pages you'll see some of my early efforts, whilst researching and collectingwork for this anniversary blog I was amazed firstly by how much work I had saved, and secondly by just how much I'd totally forgotten ever doing!

•SKETCHBOOKS

Over 30 years of ideas represented in these dog-eared, well travelled and well loved notebooks and sketchbooks. I'd been determined since artschool to never be without a pencil and notebook of some sort. Like Dumbledore's pensive they act as a kind of portable second brain.

OK, so over the years they've evolved into some kind of fetish item, and I currently have somewhere in the region of 40 brand new little gems waiting to to be opened and recorded in. If anyone would like to come and see them, I get them all out once a week and appreciate them.

The quality of the notebook often influences the productivity, that certain waxiness that soft HB has when it glides and traces over fresh creamy white cartridge! Mmmm.

In this very final image you can see the finished artwork that was initially sketched out in a WH Smith's A4 superior cartridge hard back notebook.

Please feel free to click on any image to enlarge but remember all are strictly copyright.©