Illustration Techniques

Most of my work during the 1980s was painted with an airbrush — which I'd been using by then for about six years — to create large areas of background colour, with the details added using pen or brush. I liked the airbrush as a simple and very quick method of applying colour and adding effects. It was a time-saver. One painting I did for Look & Learn had the foremast of a sailing ship shrouded in mist. All I had to do was to paint the mast and rigging in solid black and then airbrush colour over it to give the foggy effect. That would have taken days with ordinary brushes, rather than a couple of hours.

On the other hand, my comic work was mostly done with traditional brush and pen techniques, using inks, sometimes over an airbrushed background if required. It's easy to overpaint with acrylics, but you have to be more careful in the planning stage when you're using inks and an airbrush, especially in masking off areas to be left white. Generally, I'd do a pencil rough onto the board and then spray the background and large areas of colour on top, adding the fine detail by hand.

Despite its usefulness, the airbrush had its drawbacks, especially if —like me—you're not very good at coping with technical things and equipment. And the spray went everywhere, upsetting others around, particularly with some inks which stank like dead fish.

When they came around, I was often told I should move onto the computer, but in an interview of 1985 I firmly denied I would ever use one for illustrations. I found it difficult enough coping with the airbrush and I thought I could never sit down in front of a computer and fiddle endlessly with a drawing pad and the keyboard to produce the result I wanted.

In 1990 I did begin to experiment with the Apple Macintosh to produce illustrations. Enthusiasts tried me out on an electronic drawing pad, but I couldn't get on with it. It simply isn't how I draw, and the early ones were so slow and clumsy; I've never bothered again. I used Adobe Illustrator for a while, but it also failed my drawing test—far too object oriented, technical and cold.

However, where I was working at Newsfield, we had a technical journal for the developing electronic publishing market called PrePress, and Adobe sent beta copies to test and review of a new application called Photoshop. It was fantastic, even though those early versions were primitive compared to today's.