Describe the place where you write/draw.

I work all over the house. Sometimes on the kitchen table, sometimes in my office (for less messy, digital-based creations), sometimes on the coffee table in the lounge, which is very bad for my posture.

What is your most treasured possession?

I suppose I have a particularly sentimental attachment to an old Gibson Les Paul guitar. It’s a link to my misspent youth, as well as an object that still gives me a lot of pleasure to play.
 

What times of the day do you work?

As and when. I used to be able to work late into the evenings, but my aged eyeballs won’t put up with that sort of behaviour anymore.

What distracts you?

Music. Coffee. Rivers. Wikipedia.

What is your favourite smell?

Mossy trees.

Cat or dog?

I had a dog until recently; I’ve never kept a cat, but that’s not a deliberate anti-feline stance.
 

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

I’m not sure my pleasures make me feel guilty. Maybe they should?

What is the worst job you’ve done?

Assuming you don’t mean in terms of artwork (most illustration jobs I would have liked to have done better), it was probably working nights at a home delivery sorting office in Reading.

What was the last song you sang along to?

Singing would be far too mellifluous a word to describe the cacophonic noise that comes out of my face.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?

Watch ‘Midnight in Paris’. There are lots of periods in history that I have an affinity with,  but it’s a mistake to believe they are better or more interesting than the one you are currently experiencing.

What are you reading at the moment?

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

If you weren’t an author, what would you be?

Unfortunately, illustration is the only thing I’m reasonably competent at, having failed as an author and musician (which would be my other choices). I quite like digging about in the earth, so I could happily be a market gardener or archeologist.

David Wyatt has been an illustrator for a good while. Find out more at his ramshackle blog.

Rather like Neill (see his post) I find boats more interesting when they are taken out of their natural habitat. It must be an illustrator thing.
One of the very first films I saw was Pinnochio, and my favourite scene was Geppetto’s boat being consumed by a massive whale. The puppet maker seemed to live quite happily in the stomach of the beast, which resembled an enormous damp cathedral. Another film that impressed my youthful mind was Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits, featuring a giant that wore a pirate ship as a hat. Gilliam confesses in the director’s commentary that he borrowed the idea from a Brian Froud illustration, which I have since discovered in the book Master Snickup’s Cloak.
Also in the early Eighties, I was very keen on the work of comic book artist Mike McMahon; at the time he was illustrating a story called Slaine, set in the world of Celtic mythology. One adventure featured the Cloud Curragh, an ancient ship that sailed through the sky, powered by Ogham stones and the occasional human sacrifice.
I find boats fun to draw, but I prefer it if they are sailing through space or recycled as a tree house, etc. I think it’s because I find them visually unbalanced when they are bobbing about in the water. The bottom half is hidden, which is a shame as there’s a very satisfying relationship between the curve of a sail and the rounded, sculptural quality of a nice hull.

David Wyatt has been an illustrator for a good while. Find out more at his ramshackle blog.

Recently, a news story concerning the unearthing of a witch’s cottage caught my eye.

According to reports, it was clearly a witch’s cottage because it had a mummified cat bricked up in the walls, and was found in Pendle, the scene of a notorious outbreak of maleficence in the early 17th century. Ten people were hanged as witches due to a tragic tangle of religious intolerance, familial rivalry and superstition.
Whether or not this particular dwelling played host to all manner of frightful witchery will be doubtless be pondered upon by historians and people (like me) with over-active imaginations. I’ve always loved old buildings – they act as a focal point for history and legends; they are like batteries generating stories, some down-to-earth and some fanciful. Read the rest of this entry »

I recently purchased a Kindle.
For two main reasons: firstly, I was in danger of being marooned on my island of musty books as the digital tide swept past; secondly, a review on Amazon of one of my books knocked a star off for the shoddy conversion of the illustrations. Suitably miffed, I had to observe the damage for myself. It turned out it wasn’t as bad as I’d imagined. The book in question, Larklight by Philip Reeve, was illustrated in a style designed to evoke the etchings of Victorian periodicals, using very fine hatched lines. I’d used this technique before, and come unstuck occasionally when the illustrations were printed on lower quality paper. This made the images look as though they were whipped up using a decorator’s brush, not the many hours of painstaking dip-pen work (which is probably responsible for the current fragility of my eyesight). Consequently, I was expecting to see this kind of smudgy disaster emerge in digital form on the Kindle, but it was fine – the screen resolution ensured that the pictures were perfectly readable.
The problem arose when illustrations were taken out of context, enlarged or shrunk too much. The original book was designed so that the words and pictures interwove, wrapping round each other to produce an effect that only a traditional book could achieve. That has been lost in the conversion. I’m wondering, in the future will illustrated books be designed to sit more comfortably in these modern devices, but will it be too restrictive? Will we need to design specifically for the gadgets that deliver the content? Despite my reservations with the conversion of existing books, I think there are lots of exciting ways these gadgets can be exploited to tell stories in a new and fresh way.

And to get back to the ‘classics’ topic, you can access hundreds of free books at the touch of a button. Tonight I shall be enjoying The Castle of Otranto (and trying not to think of ways to illustrate it for a Kindle device).

David Wyatt has been an illustrator for a good while. Find out more at his ramshackle blog. 

I have had so many embarrassing incidents to deal with they have become unremarkable. As a part-time musician, every week seems to offer an interesting new way of making an idiot of oneself in public; the trick is to carry on regardless, pretend nothing horrendous has occurred and save the squirming and self-loathing for later.

Consequently, I am going ‘off-brief’ to talk about Trolls.

I recently had the pleasure of illustrating the cover of Conrad Mason’s The Demon’s Watch, which features a pair of identical Troll twins. To get me in the mood I did some research and looked through some of my favourite Troll artists (if this article becomes tedious, skip to the end and click on some of the links for some visual treats).

In Norse mythology, Trolls began life as the offspring of Ymir, the Frost Giant. They were said to be of huge size, varied in appearance and temperament; generally more like gods than the bridge-bothering creatures of folklore we recognise today.

Gradually they settled into the mythic landscape as a race of beings representative of the elements; sometimes benevolent, sometimes mischievous, sometimes downright vicious. They lived in societies of their own, in hollow hills, forests and wild mountainous regions. Read the rest of this entry »