Well, away from writing this is my other pet project. I’ve always been interested in art. Not Farty Art!! I have never been to an art gallery and currently have no plans to do so. I haven’t scrutinized the smile of the Mona Lisa, admired the brush strokes of The Scream or pondered the styles of Picasso. The only major “artist” I have taken to is surrealist Salvador Dali – can’t imagine why.

My type of art runs well with my type of writing. I like fantasy art, gothic art and dark sinister art. Also anything that makes me smile, or has some kind of parody behind it. And then there is Winchester, my own cartoon character who will soon have his own page on this site.

Of the current crop of seasoned fantasy artists out there, I personally am drawn to Luis Royo, Brom and Lorenzo Sperlonga, although there are many other great and up-and-coming artists out there. And I would like to make it clear that it is not only for the scantily clad, beautifully crafted females found there…honestly.

Anyway, I have taken the first steps with my own works of art, mainly focussing on images from my own writing. I’ve now got more digital art generators and programmes than PC World, and only need a couple of more items to begin producing some professional pieces that might make me some money. For now, I’m limited to two types of art, landscape and cartoon.

For the landscape side of it, the one preliminary design I have is a place that will appear in one volume of The Syndicate. The Rock of Dudane.

The Rock stands just off the coast of the isolated village of Dudane, and it hides a dark secret. Whether protagonist Logan Raine and any companions he has gathered at that time pass beyond The Rock will depend on them surviving the horrors of Dudane itself.

On the cartoon side of my work there are two separate fields – characters and scenes. The characters I create are never planned. If I plan to draw something specific it doesn’t work. My characters come from moments of brief inspiration that I either develop there and then or lose forever. My best creation so far is the bird, Winchester. Somewhere in the random pile of papers scattered around my room there are a number of other significant characters yet to come to light including The Drasco Twins, a couple of designs for Butch and Sundance - the two leads from The Lost Eggs story - and a currently nameless bird that looks like a feathered dumpling. When the Winchester Page is up and in order, I will have some final drawings of these to add on it.

On the side of the scenes, most of these have been done for a specific purpose be it Halloween, Christmas or in the cases of the designs below, for promotional purposes. The company I work for have a Process Improvements Group which goes under the acronym of PIG. Bearing this in mind, I developed a number of different cartoon pigs for the poster campaigns. The Group had been rather defunct for a long while and needed a complete rethink and overhaul, so the first design I came up with was the PIG Resurrection poster, followed by the others.