I live in London, in one of the cheap bits. I always thought that it was compulsory to have had lots of different and exotic jobs to be able to work as anything like an artist or writer - you know, you always get the potted biographies that go 'before writing his internationally best-selling novel, Ptolemy Corktoe had spells working as, among other things, a waiter, a crocodile wrestler, a go-go dancer in a specialist London nightclub, and an accountant.' My CV is less exciting than that. I have worked as an admin assistant at a university, a secretarial college and a publisher, and spent a fairly disastrous spell in direct marketing. It was the direct marketing job that made me think: what am I doing here? I then ran off to join Westminster University. Where I got a degree in Illustration. After that, I got a job I really enjoyed, as a graphics person for a prop maker, on everything from sitcoms to feature films. Usually it involved making fake magazines for sitcoms and the like, but every now and again I'd find myself sticking fake fur onto 8-foot-high nodding dogs. That one made all the skin peel off my hands. I also got to do illustrations, for example producing childrens' drawings, comics and illuminated manuscripts. I like to draw with a dip pen and ink. There's no particular type I prefer - I just try out different things and see which ones I like, and different inks work for different things. I also like to play around with combinations of digital colour, watercolour, and Dr Martin's liquid colours. I have illustrated two picture books for Picture Kelpies, which is an imprint of Floris Books. They are: Lewis Clowns Around, by Lynne Rickards, and The Big Bottom Hunt, by Lari Don.