Quentin Blake

This is my studio, or it’s the room that I use as my studio. It’s in a flat in South Kensington and it’s, like it because it’s, it’s quiet and it looks out onto trees in, in Kensington Square.  So if I’m coming into work, I, I stand to draw and I stand at this plan chest with a light box on top, and I’m probably switching on the light box so I can see a rough drawing that I’ve done previously underneath, and I work over that.  The, the essence of the thing is that, that, what that rough does is that it tells me where everything in the drawing’s going to go.  So I feel secure about that.  But in fact I, I, I draw as if just as if I was drawing it for the first time.

Sometimes I use quills and I think the last picture book I did was done altogether with, with quills. 

And they’re, they’re an old fashioned invention but they…they work perfectly well and you just have to allow, accept that you’re gonna get some things wrong and start again, cos I do quite a lot of starting again, but you get used to, to using them.  And then when I’ve done some of that, it’s a question of getting the pictures in sequence really.  When I move into colour I probably bring them over here.  In fact, in this room, this used to be empty when I came here 30 years ago.  It was a nice and large white room, but now of course it’s full of too much stuff and there’s one wall which are books which I’ve illustrated at some time or another, and there’s some shelves with materials on and there’s lots of paper.  I’ve been working in this room for 30 years I suppose now, and everything I’ve drawn has been drawn here, except some books which I’ve done because I’ve got a studio in France for the past 10 or 15 years, I’ve worked there as well.  But really it, they, they, they, they start here which is a, I mean it’s a strange thought to me because they go into books and when I look at the range of books and the number of books it… it, it comes as a bit of a surprise really, I mean how, how many of them there are. 

I just, I suppose I just… work on from, from day to day and I’m, I’m not thinking too much about the, the, the books that have happened in the past.  And I’m always interested in what the next one might be.