Stuff that has influenced me

• superheroes, superhero fingerpuppets
• record sleeves (beatles)
• pop art imagery
• comics (archie as purehart the powerful) colours, print, ragged edges of pages, poor print quality
• walt disney
• Belgian comics (Blake et Mortimer). Belgian comics are very much unlike American ones. They are beautifully printed, hard cover books with serious stories and very high quality drawing.
• Maurice Tillieux: Gil Jourdan

Jack Kirby's Marvel comics. Amazing futuristic scenes, machines, ridicolous stories like superman vs frankenstein

• Children's activity books. Reduced shapes, limited colour palette, leaves a lot up to the imagination
• Comic lettering. Huge drop shadows, conveys excitement

Men Only magazine covers (1940s). Loose linework, flat colour.

• Never mind the bollocks, here's the sex pistols
• Saul Steinberg: The Discovery of America
• Hergé: Tintin, End Papers
• Go 2 Record Sleeve. "This is a record cover. This writing is the design upon the record cover [...]"

My own work

• Mostly editorial illustration
• Advertising for Ben and Jerry's Foundation
• Gravitylight, We walk the line
• Own work as a break from comercial work
• Editorial jobs give you all sorts of different subjects to work on, most random stuff

Stuff I look at

• Shop signage
• Lettering
• Ice cream vans
• Neon signage
• Random stickers
• Lettering with snow on top
• Straightforward shop names

Process

• Pencil drawings
• Brush and ink black line art
• Digital colouring
• Very rarely meet my own clients (all through email, agency)
• Work from a shared studio

Super Book for Superheroes

• workshops with kids
• book has developed into its own thing
• The Superhero Comic Kit
• Coming up: Superhero Adventure Playset (paper engineering, pop-up book)

Questions

Do you have any advice for finding a good workspace?

• We just replied to an ad
• The market is getting more competetive
• Renting a place is definitely a learning process
• Find a group of people you like working with and set up a studio with them
• People will change over time
• Split the rent between a number of people