AUTHOR, ILLUSTRATOR, SCHOOL WORKSHOPS AND FESTIVALS
About Me
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I grew up in the countryside near Thornbury, Gloucestershire, with my three siblings. (That's me in the red jumper.) With much encouragement from our parents, we spent a lot of time making stuff – constructing all sorts of things from household junk or from our box of jumbled-up Lego, as well as learning to make model boats and planes from balsa wood in our patient dad's workshop.
I also have great memories of holidays with our extended family on various islands in the west of Scotland, with the excitement of those trips and the atmosphere of those places definitely finding their way into my imagination.
I liked reading, and many of the books I most loved were in visual or comic-strip forms, such as Hergé's intricately crafted Tintin stories, Heath Robinson's elegantly ramshackle invention drawings, and numerous funny and exciting picture books and illustrated novels by so many fabulous authors and illustrators.
I always enjoyed drawing and I absorbed many useful graphic and narrative techniques from all my reading, while being inspired to have the fun of making up my own characters, stories, invention pictures and comic strips.
I also enjoyed drama, and I studied Performing Arts at Middlesex Polytechnic in North London, a wide-ranging practical course, covering all sorts of design and making aspects of theatre as well as performance subjects, and with a lot of encouragement for us to devise and write our own productions.
After graduating, I stayed in London for a few years, at first making much of my living from selling my pen-and-ink watercolour pictures of pubs and houses to their owners, supplemented by some part-time bar work and from playing my viola in a ceilidh band, but beginning to get some of my cartooning work published in magazines and newspapers.
In the early 1990s I moved to Edinburgh, expanding my cartooning and illustration work and also getting involved with puppet theatre, utilising many of the skills from my degree. And eventually (after many years of trying and a bit of good luck!) I managed to interest publishers in my ideas for children's books.
These days, I live in the western suburbs of Edinburgh, with one of my two grown-up sons. I enjoy walking in my local woods or at nearby beaches, in all weathers and seasons, and exploring bits of the city with my partner.
Like many writers, I've found Edinburgh has fired my imagination, inspiring the locations and stories of many of my books, directly or indirectly. The city's multi-layered architecture and character make it seem the ideal place to find eccentric inventors, hidden museum rooms or peculiar little shops leading to secret underground transport systems!
And I also get much enjoyment and ongoing inspiration from my travels to cities, towns, villages and islands up and down the country to carry out my creative sessions, working with such enthusiastic and imaginative children and all their fantastic teachers, librarians and festival organisers.
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