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When I left art school and went in search of work, visiting publishers and showing them my drawings and illustrations, I was met with a polite and sometimes enthusiastic response but no commissions.

Coming into the business, you'd pass through these little agencies until you got to understand what was happening in the business, unless you were really able to have a style strong enough to go directly to the publishers.

I'm still awaiting the idea of drawing comics for a living being a reality. I feel like I've been dodging work for 20 years, and at some point, I'll have to get a real job.

I'm not really a guy who draws on things from my own past. I think if you're a competent actor with a good imagination, and if it's on the page, it makes your job a lot easier. If it's well written, it allows your imagination to run wild and draw inspiration from that.

Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author's imagination.

For 'Picture This,' I wanted it to be a drawing book that didn't have any instructions about drawing, beyond the real simple stuff you'd find like in a Bazooka bubblegum wrapper, or in 'Highlights' magazine. I just wanted it to be feelings about looking and seeing and pictures.

In a fit of pique, I said to my agent, 'I'm going to write something you can sell.' The idea was to write a straight page-turner, with no literary conceits.

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'd want to read the stories that I'd written, I'd want to show the drawings that I made. That was just purely natural. So I knew I wanted to go into the arts in some way and that I'd want to show that work in some way.

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