Me

As I progressed into my teens, I became very educational, and excelled at school. I took up airfix model building and reading (Fantasy novels, comics and popular science books mostly) and kept myself to myself. After a few years however, I had a lot of problems with school, and the people there. It was one of the worst times in my life and one of the most productive. I spent a lot of time away from school, at home reading and drawing and writing. This is where I felt i truly concentrated on my art (mostly as a way to escape reality) and within a year or so of this I feel I had progressed many normal years worth of practice. The end of secondary school examinations (GCSE's here in the UK) loomed and I didn't do as well as I was predicted, due to my lack of time actually at school, in every subject but Art. I had poured everything I had into my art, and it was a huge help that one of the few teachers who actually teached and helped the kids in my school was my art teacher. I was rewarded with perfect 100% A*, which no student had achieved in many years at my school.

After leaving school, I found myself into the boring world of retail and sales, which slowed down work on my art and provided no inspiration whatsoever. It was only when I bought a digital camera and went for wanders in the local park, did i find that I enjoyed photography and made it a challenge to teach myself. This also led to a lot more inspiration for my art. I was first focused on fine artists such and Constable, and the realistic twisted worlds of MC Escher, before I found Paul Kidby's work through fantasy books (Discworld). From this I concentrated on progressing to make as realistic drawings as possible and learning the underlying physics and structure of bodies and muscles on animals and humans. The form and the way muscle moves over bone to stretch and fold skin has always fascinated me, with the textures and patterns of hair and cloth. After studying this (not saying I've finished studying it!) I moved onto my childish tastes of cartoons from when I was young. Ren and Stimpy, Pinky and the Brain, Freakazoid, Wallace and Gromit, and many many more always fascinated me and I went about teaching myself to draw cartoons, which is still in the early stages.