Combining pen and Photoshop

Over two to three years, I gradually moved away from inks and the airbrush until, in recent years, I've produced almost all my work on the computer. In a way it's a shame—all you end up with is a digital file, there's no physical board with colour and texture on it, nothing to frame and hang on the wall. When you paint by hand, the acrylics or the inks are never quite perfectly laid down on the paper and board. There are always tiny artefacts caused by the hand. In Photoshop everything's perfect and, because you can zoom in so close, you tend to become obsessed with pixel-perfect alignment.

To a degree I get around this problem through something that hasn't changed with using a computer—drawing. I begin with the back of an envelope and sketch out rough ideas as thumbnails. They usually resemble little more than a swirl of lines indicating the composition and motion of figures. No one understands them, but I can interpret them later with a pencil on paper at full size.

For a 'line-and-wash' illustration I scan in the pencil drawing as a lineart bitmap. In Photoshop I convert the bitmap to greyscale, then colour. The scan is still in bitmap form, so it's easy to grab and delete out the white background to transparent. After that I can colour the line any way I want, and start adding the colour detail on layers underneath. Sometimes, just naturally, the painting under- or overlaps the line, forming those artefacts of the hand-painted version. It's very small but it adds that touch of life to the finished artwork.

With halftones, I paint over the pencil drawing on paper with black ink, from hard line to the faintest wash, scan it as a greyscale halftone and convert to colour. The drawing layer is then set to either darken or multiply, possibly recoloured itself, before using Photoshop brushes to add the colour and detail on separate layers.

I think this technique sets my illustrations apart from much other computer-generated art, giving them the feeling of a lively surface texture that, in reality, isn't there. The airbrush and compressor have remained in the attic. there's no way around it—Photoshop inks don't smell like vomit, the brushes never clog up, you don't have to wash everything out to change colours and you never get dirty fingernails.

Oddly, although I'm left-handed, I work on the Mac using my right hand. When I first started using a design workstation I had usually borrowed it for a while from another member of staff and it was inevitably set up for right-handed use. So I just picked up the mouse in that hand and started painting.

Nearly all of my pictures are set in the past or the future— including the pure fantasy illustrations. The games magazines of the 1980s and early 90s provided me with both in abundance, or at least fantasy adventures such as James Bond. In recent years, I've spent more time with historical subjects in reference books.

I've never liked the Here And Now for subject matter—the Now doesn't inspire me much. All my paintings are bigger than life (in spirit if not dimension), mainly because life isn't as exciting as it can appear in pictures. I escape into the picture I'm painting. When I'm really concentrating I imagine I'm really there, looking onto the action in the painting—otherwise it's difficult to see things in my mind's eye.

It can take me a couple of hours to 'come down' from a picture—I sometimes spend an hour staring at it. I'm in an alternate reality, I suppose. To work, the picture has to be convincing to me, which means I have to get really involved in what's happening. I've always been a romantic dreamer. Ever since the games I played as a child I've been able to get totally immersed in a fantasy world. I think it says something about my psyche that I was always the Baddie, never the Brave Sheriff, always the evil and doomed SS Monster, never the War Hero.

Other than fantasy, I'm passionate about history. History may be about real people but, lacking photographs, their lives and actions have to be imagined in a believable way. I enjoy illustrating historical scenes—particularly big battles—even though it involves a lot of references. In some ways it's simpler to draw futuristic scenes and fantasy—references aren't a problem because I make it all up and it's just a matter of producing a painting that has its own accuracy and detail.

I've just bought some acrylics, inks and brushes to get back to basics again. I want to produce some more originals that have a life without the need for a computer and hard drive to exist. I see no reason why the two disciplines shouldn't exist side by side and no reason why the one won't complement the other. That's for the immediate future—back to dirty finger nails, I guess.