12. Life in California

Came 1993  and there i was sitting in my office and staring out at the grey skys above England when we decided to move to the U.S. of A and the sunny, warm climate of California, and that is what we did. getting all my publishers to think that I was still in the UK was  another matter.

But I kept up the daily calls to my publishers and kept them at ease, after all nothing had really changed, I was just a few thousand miles away! And didn’t distance make the heart grow fonder? Work started to pour in and I was constantly turning down jobs.

It was on one of my winging whining talks with my son Carl that he suggested I switch to computer colored art, and that would gain me another pair of hands, his!
He researched many programs and we finally found one that imitated color and paper texture for the publisher to be happy, actually I didn’t tell them of the  switch and they still think I scan in my art.

My son joined me in Santa Barbara and worked with me for a couple of years until he decided to return to the UK and work and commute from there.   We used an iMac, yes, one of those tiny little screens that make you squint. It crashed daily with the size of files we loaded, but we persevered, and now today working on the new Wacom Cintique  I wonder how we ever made it.

Make it we did and in 1995 I started to create animated thirteen episode series for the BBC. It was called Sprogs but when the US got interested, the name changed to BB3B and ran its course in the UK, I’ve yet to see any rights payments but such is the movie industry.