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For most of my career I illustrated books for other people.

I began illustrating children's books because of a growing disillusionment with the sort of work I was doing in the advertising industry. Book publishing offered me the chance to be far more creative.

I love illustrating for other writers because I am given stories I never would have thought of, and my work as an illustrator is always in support of the story.

I've been taking art lessons since I was little, and I've always drawn. I think in pictures.

I've done a bit of teaching, but I gave it up - I felt uneasy teaching illustration to people who hadn't yet learned to draw.

I'm a big illustration and comic book fan. In my eyes, comic books and illustration are the same kind of art forms.

It wasn't until I discovered comics that I actually began to approach drawing as a possible career.

I hadn't thought specifically about doing graphic novels until a couple of my friends got contracts for them. Then I started picturing how various of my stories or poems would work in an illustrated format and thinking how cool that would be.

I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time.

I'm interested in illustration in all its forms. Not only in books for children but in posters, prints and performance as a way of drawing people into books and stories.