1. The death of my father.

I guess there are many people in the world nursing a book they have written, or want to write, because I’m often asked if I can help by illustrating them, or getting them published.  I very rarely work with authors directly, but the boom in digital books is changing all that and I am more inclined to keep an open mind.

As a writer I’m a bit of a fraud, I had to leave school at the age of fifteen to take care of my mother. I  have very few grammatical skills, putting in, commas, where they, are not needed’ and periods when I breath in,  helped only by my trusted spell check, I limp through what you are about to read.

For those who want to know who I am or how I got here, or there,
this is the history of a self-made illustrator, along with all the gnarly bits.

Mum and Dad’s wedding

I was born in a small Manchester suburb in the United Kingdom. I  was pretty young and wasn’t yet ready for the world, I certainly didn’t have my shit together. I got all my artistic talents from my father who would help me build animals out of modeling clay and make forts and stuff like that. Unfortunately he died when I was 4 years old in a traffic accident, and my career as a sculptor took a downward plunge.

Shortly after, my mother remarried and I inherited a new brother and sister. But to my new family I was just baggage and from there on we became locked in mortal combat! More about that later! For now I was a stranger in a strange land and I had to survive. I grew up in a yellow nicotine stained house and I was miserable. But survive I did.

Continued . . .