Biography

I was born in xxxx in Kingston-upon-Thames.
I grew up to find I was artistic and had a love of nature and green things. The former was nature, the latter was nurture.

I was an obsessive sketch book maker, eventually graduating to O' Level and A' Level art and biology (there were more but they are the only ones that matter here). From there I ploughed the artistic furrow of a Foundation Course at the art college in the town of my birth. A degree in Graphic Design/Illustration from Canterbury College of Art was obtained in 1989 (you can try and work out my age now), and I left formal education for the big wide world.

I have had a varied and interesting career, I was a self-employed papier maché artist for several years, selling my original creations at craft fairs, local art/craft shops, Hull University, oh, and Harvey Nichols in London. They used one of my creations to advertise their home department on the London routemaster buses for Christmas 1994 which was rather gratifying.

I have had many other part-time and temporary jobs which have influenced me in one way or other, including: hop-picker, apple-picker, life-drawing model, skip-hire receptionist, assembly line worker in a switch factory, pizza restaurant waitress, cleaner, papershop operative, garden centre plant department commando and many other work incarnations which have all been invaluable in making me the well-rounded person that I am today. I only regret that I never found the time to become a music hall artist.

I completed the first half of a teaching course for adult education and taught papier maché briefly before getting a full-time job in a design agency as an illustrator, where I worked with a great group of people for nine years and learned lots of lovely computer skills.

I am now a freelance illustrator and artist and I can honestly say that it beats working in a switch factory hands down.

I can also drive a car, knit and sew moderately well, and sometimes make ham-fisted attempts at playing the guitar. My main areas of interest are as follows: art: exhibitions and art history, photography, social history, fiction novels, traveling around the British Isles, (combining many of my interests in the process), horticulture, natural history, organically cultivating an allotment plot (from whence the potato above came), yoga, cycling, swimming, British comedy, music from the first half of the 20th century, music from lots of other periods, and friends.