When I first saw the topic for this round of blogs, I thought, ‘this will be nice and easy, Just need to answer a couple of questions and I’ll be done until the next round…’

Then I saw Sarah Mcantyre’s post. She had decided to illustrate each answer out. That was a cool idea. But now I had to answer it using illustrations, I couldn’t copy her idea (though in hindsight, I should have). So I decided to come up with another way of answering it using illustrations.

After deliberating for a while, I came up with something. Something that I thought would be cool. I decided to do a single illustration which was going to answer all of the questions at once. It was going to be amazing!

Trouble was, I didn’t have time to figure out how I was going to make it- so had to just make it up as i went along…that didn’t quite work out as planned.

The combination of my camera not photographing too well at night and a generally bad sketch made sure that I will have to answer the questions as originally planned.

So here they are:

Describe the place where you write/draw

On my desk, in the spare room of our flat. There are a few cracks on the ceiling and the electricity supply was fitted before they invented the lightbulb. I used to sit on a swivel chair but that broke. From my window you can see where the Eiffel tower would be on the horizon except someone built flats opposite us, so i just have to imagine it now.

What is your most treasured possession?

I have two, but they are consumables (so I don’t know if this counts). Dairy Milk, and Coca Cola, but only in the glass bottles.

What times of the day do you work?

I work from around 10am until 4am. Need to change that really.

What distracts you?

Cleaning the fingerprints off my Ipad.

What is your favourite smell?

Vicks. Spaghetti Bolognese.

Cat or dog?

Dog, in particular giant Jack Russells. Read the rest of this entry »

After reading the topic for this round of blogs, I was at a bit of a loss because i was sure that everyone would come out with loads of really interesting stories about real world experiences they’ve had which inspired them to write something that is extraordinarily brilliant.

I usually come up with ideas by drawing out a character or landscape, and then thinking about why they are there and what they are doing…and this can develop into a happy story, a sad story, a complicated story etc.

Most of what influences me is subliminal, and predominately from film or television, as the worlds i like to create contain things that I haven’t had the chance to see first hand, or they just don’t exist at all.

Occasionally, however i see something that influences me to the point that I notice it, and notice the change in my work that it creates.

One such example was the series ‘Planet Earth’ by the BBC. (image below)

From the first time I saw the wide shots of the Earth’s largest waterfall,  the slow panning of the peaks of the Himalayas,  to the solitary polar bear navigating its way through the great expanse of the Arctic; I was hooked. I thought, ‘this looks amazing I want to draw it!’. I even made a book at university which was set in the Arctic (illustration below).

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Because of the subject of the last round of blogs (an Archie moment), I ended up producing a comic strip about Inspector Clouseau. It was fun, but not the way I generally work, so for the next set of blogs I said to myself that i’d try and do an illustration closer to the way I usually work.

The subject for this set of blogs was to discuss literary classics.

As chance would have it I had already started something along these lines…  A couple of years ago I spoke to someone who suggsted that I try some illustrations for a classic book because it suited my quite (at the time) traditional way of working.The three books that came to mind were Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels and Treasure Island.  I decided to go with Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.

My first idea was to try and illustrate it in a Darwin-esque way, drawing different tools, flowers, objects and places that Robinson found on his journey. But I wanted to see what Robinson looked like so I did some concepts of him as well as a narrative image of a raft in a rough sea. In the end I wasn’t really sure whether to to illustrate it in a more narrative way or a more scientific way. I think my preference would have been narrative, but the trouble with that is that it had already been done and done very well in that style by N.C Wyeth.

I had other ideas i was working on at the time, so in the end decided to shelve it until I become more established, maybe then I’ll be able to take on a literary classic…

Some of the concepts I did for it are below.

Richard Collingridge is an illustrator and concept artist. He has previously worked on the covers for Trash by Andy Mulligan, The Deserter by Peadar O’ Guilin, and WE by John Dickinson. Richard’s first picture book, When It Snows, is currently in production. You can find out more about Richard on his webpage.

When I saw the topic for the new DFB blog about comic misunderstandings, I thought, ‘Cool, that’s happened to me loads of times’.

The first thing that came to mind was something that happens quite frequently. My girlfriend is French and I am English; we both speak each other’s language quite well, but at certain times when I try and explain something to her, a word will come up that I don’t know in French. So I say it in English… she won’t understand it… so out of frustration I say it again, and again, and again… until eventually I give up. Just at that moment, pretty much every time, she’ll say ‘Oh, you mean…’  – followed by exactly the same word that I have just tried to get her to understand. The only difference is that she will say it with a French accent.

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