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About me:
I’m an Englishman in his late 20s who moved to Holland in the summer of 2001 to start working in the computer games industry as a designer. Originally it was only supposed to be a stay of six months but I am still here. Before Holland I worked in the theater industry but I really wanted to be a Ghostbuster when I was growing up.
Why Holland?
A lot of people asked me, "What made you decide to move to Holland?"
I always give the same answer, "I didn't. It was an accident."
I'd spent sometime trying to get a job in the computer games industry but I was not having much luck until I came across a rather strange and cryptic job advertisement in a British gaming magazine. It had no address, no phone number. In fact it had very few details. All it really had was a dot com email address. It might have sounded like I could have ended up falling victim to a gang of black market human organ dealers using a games company as a front but I took the chance.
Imagine my surprise when I was offered an interview and found out it was in Holland. They offered to pay for my flights and I would have time after the interview to do a little sight seeing. It was a free day trip. I was not thinking about the fact that they might actually offer me the job..... which they did.
Several years later and I’m still here. Plus I still have both my kidney's which is a bonus.
Can you speak the language?
“Ik heb geen idee wat u zegt,” (“I have no idea what you said”) was a phrase I used a lot in my first year of living in Holland and it still tends to get a fair amount of use. My Dutch language skills are maybe not what they should be but I can speak some of it. I first learned to count in Dutch from the phone numbers that were read out on the late night adverts for porn phone lines which is why I can count in a very sexy voice. I later found out there was no need to moan between each number.
There is a lot of English language culture here from TV to books. I know a few Dutch people who even learnt to speak English from watching the A-Team as children. However I have yet to hear any of them, “Pitty the fool.”
How do you draw the cartoons?
I first started drawing the cartoons I use for this blog a few years ago. The look of the characters has not changed much but the way I draw them has evolved a lot as I've learnt more about PhotoShop. Originally I drew the cartoons by hand, scanned them and then went over them with the pen tool in Photoshop CS but to make the process a little faster I have created a library of parts which I can easily play around with. Each body part of the character is on a different layer. However, each cartoon usually has a unique element to it which requires some new drawing. Depending on the complexity of the alterations needed a cartoon can take between 1 and 2 hours. The colouring and shading is also done in Photoshop (all done on separate layers). Once it is complete I find a suitable back ground which I blur and place into the cartoon.
I’ve put together a video to show how this all works. The first part is a quick demonstration of how I can use this process to make facial expressions. The second part shows how I turned the template image in to the cartoon used on this sites gallery page (You can also click here for more info.
How much do you look like your character?
The Invader Stu toon is a cross between how I look now and how I looked when I was a child. When I was little I was covered in freckles which the cartoon still has and the hair is a mix between my messy and wild kid’s style and my adult over use of hair gel….. And yes, I am ginger.
Have you ever thought about creating a comic?
I originally started drawing the Invader Stu cartoon as part of a comic I created about my college years (a source of many crazy stories). When I started this blog I had no plans to add the cartoons but after a few posts it seemed like a good idea.
I plan to create a few small comics every now and then for this blog and maybe develop it into something more later. No promises yet. Watch this space.
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