About Foxwood Tales

By and large with Foxwoood I just lived in my own world ( or the world of Foxwood ) doing things my way without influence or direction from anyone else not even my publisher. I just illustrated a book in my natural style, once the story had been edited and approved, and after nine months work or thereabouts, gave it to them and they published it.

No hassles or monthly meetings or changes to be made based on what some assistant editors or studio juniors might have opinions on. No brief, no direction, no political correctness, no-one to please except me ( and Cynthia of course, my greatest critic) I was given complete creative freedom, the best way to get the best out of any artist, and I loved it.

Inspiration and influences for Foxwood would often come from the villages and the countryside around me and ocassionally references from historical TV programmes if they were of the period Foxwood was loosely based in.

Sometimes I would include parts of my own back garden where we lived in Shiplake, Nr Henley-On -Thames

and sometimes I would get architectural inspiration from other locations in Oxfordshire in quaint villages with their character cottages having interesting windows or doors or other unusual details.

When the publishing took off as it did then that was quickly followed up with demand for licensed product and very quickly our publishers started running out space to store the samples that came pouring in, as well as the staff to cope with it all. after all they weren't licencing agents, they were publishers and that's when the dyamics changed.

One day out of the blue I got a call from Christian Stegmann who we didn't know at the time but whom had seen the Foxwood books and wanted to us to meet with him and his partner to discuss the possibility of working together on a licensing programme. We did so and ultimately it proved to be a long and fruitful relationship which is still going strong to this day.

Our good friend and licensing agent Christian Stegmann stood by Foxwood from the very early days and was instumental in introducing us to a much wider audience as Foxwood took off internationally and trips around the world from Italy to Taiwan and further afield made for an exciting time as Cynthia and I managed business, babies and creativity all at the same time.

Working with Christian has always been a pleasure and even though he is in Germany and we have now moved to Cornwall, communication in todays era is just as easy as when we lived in Oxfordshire.

New ideas flourish and Cornwall is a very inspirational place to live and visit and we always look forward to seeing Christian to relive old times, discuss business and talk about plans for the future.

Hi, as the creator and illustrator of Foxwood Tales and I would like to share a little info about the books and their creation that might be of interest to those who have enjoyed the world of Foxwood over the years.

I am not sure how I developed my style of illustration that millions of people have taken to all over the world but

I think my fondness for cartoon characters coupled with a sense of humour and good grasp of detail was a combination that worked for me.

I remember as a ten year old boy my writing was the worst and I was bottom of the class. Then one Friday afternoon as I recall it the teacher set a handwriting test, the winner of whom would receive a large bar of Chocolate to take home for the weekend.

Well, say no more, I just had to win that chocolate and so with determination I focused on the perfection of each letter I drew. Perfect circles, straight lines, beautiful curves. My line of text was a masterpiece of exceution and I went from bottom of the class to top of the class in that one session which taught me a big lesson, that with care and patience nothing is unachievable and whenever neccessary I can always rise to the ocassion if I focus and put my mind to it. ~ Drawing, which is where any illustration begins is a bit like handwriting. Focus on the detail and the perfection of the line and the rest will follow.

Of course there is much more to Foxwood than the pictures. A sense of time and place is hugely important too, which is what I get from the stories that Cynthia writes for me to illustrate and thankfully her memories of being a county girl growing up on a small farm in Somerset is sympathetic to my own childhood experiences. Combine our thoughts and feelings when we get together to discuss a new adventure for our characters and there you have it.....

A new Foxwood story everytime.

The Characters of Harvey Mouse, Rue Rabbit and Willy Hedgehog seems like an obvious trio of cute country animals but I sometimes wonder if I drew on some past memory tucked away in my subconcious when I created them. I say this because an early childhood favourite I vaguely remember was Rag Tag and Bobtail and I think those characters were a mouse a hedgehog and a rabbit. I was only a toddler at the time so I couldn't really tell what these little glove puppets on TV were but I remember even to this day I loved them to bits, much more than all the other 'Watch with Mother' programmes back in the fifties. So did the drawning of Harvey Rue and Willy pop out of the long lost memory of a 1950's toddler or was it the greetings card that kicked it all off. Who knows but I do wonder.

As I grew it was Disney cartoons that took over my creative passions and in my formative years living in Scotland, the Sunday papers had Oor Wullie and the Broons to amuse me. The Dandy and the Beano were always fun as well and we swapped Superman comics and victorian scraps in the playground, all of which helped me develop my eye and an appreciation of line, colour and form.

I was always top of the class in art and I remember once when I was around ten years old sitting next to a boy in art lessons who told the teacher he wanted to be an illustrator when he grew up. A What? it sounded very posh to me but

little did I know then that that's what I would become later in life.

In school we were banned at one point from telling jokes to each other in class as it was too noisy and disruptive.

To get around this I started writing down the jokes on scraps of paper and adding illustrations to them to make

them funnier which I would then pass around the class when teacher wasn't looking. This led me to start developing characters with funny personalities which I carried on doing throughout my life.

When I was 13 my family moved from Scotland to Somerset and at the age of 16 I left school and entered a five year apprenticeship as a hand lettering artist in a local firm. - I met Cynthia a few years later and in my early twenties we got married and moved to London.

As a young adult working in a commercial studio in London my illustrations were always penned a bit surreptitiously as and when the opportunity presented itself because I wasn't employed for that purpose but people who saw my work were often impressed and would ask if I would consider illustrating some story or other they had written.

Of course none of this amounted to anything but I continued to illustrate and invent characters and fantasy scenes at home for my own amusement, working late into the night by desk lamp in our one room flat whilst Cynthia slept on the fold down sofa bed two feet away from me and I painted whilst all the world was quiet and asleep.

Eventually through various changes of employer I landed a job as an in house illustrator at the head office of the British Printing Corporation in London and through contacts in connected departments was introduced to a company client who was looking for an artist and had been told about my work. We met, he took me to a famous chinese restaurant in Covent Garden and afterwards seeing my illustrations he liked them so much that he bought my entire portfolio. A great day for me and I even had a free lunch.

So it turned out my late night painting sessions weren't a waste of time and a good working relationship developed between me and my new patron, mainly through working with him in the greetings card industry which eventually

led to my introduction to Deans Books which ultimately led to me making a start on mocking up the Foxwood Tales ideas, and the rest is history.

The Lashbrook stream running through our garden at Brookfield, Shiplake, used as inspiration for the first illustration in the Magic Sleigh

The Lashbrook, running through our garden at Brookfield, Shiplake, inspiring a backdrop for the Secret Valley.

Inspirational cottages near Whitchurch on Thames, Oxfordshire

At home in the Garden by the Lashbrook stream.

My take on a Shed which I built in the corner of our garden in Henley-On-Thames in the early years of Foxwood.

Me working in my Henley Studio

Some outdoor time away from the studio to sketch ideas and get some fresh air.

Critiquing and discussing things as we go along

is an essential part of any creative process.

As for my work, my style, the individuality of my handwriting so to speak, I guess it was just in me, just a part of my make up, my years of drawing and painting in my own peculiar way and my distant childhood memories of the countryside I enjoyed and played in as I grew up.

A chilhood I remember as being without care. Without adult supervision, pure freedom to run wild, to fish

in the Scottish burns with our jam jars, build dens in the woods, swing on ropes from the limbs of trees hanging over cliffs or rivers, dam up streams to create swimming holes, play on the old railway lines, the scrap heap, the dump, come home dirty, wet and muddy, sometimes to a good thrashing for ruining yet another pair of school shoes. But life was sweet, nothing phased me and despite beatings, bullying, playground fights, the teacher's strap the headmaster's cane I came through unscathed, and unbowed in my individuality.

In winter it was so cold we had ice on the inside of the windows, so cold we built igloos and made tobogan runs, made snowmen and slides, and tested our nerves on thin ice covering dark, deep and dangerous waters. Running around in winter half naked with hands so hot from our energetic endevours we didn't need gloves or scarves or coats. We had boiling hot blood coursing through our veins and life was for the living.

So those memories, those feelings, were always present when sitting down to illustrate the Foxwood books.

Good old times, great memories, and if stuck for inspiration I had my old books I could refer to. Not the modern childrens books of the day. I never cared for them much and I had no idea at all about what was being published out there in the big wide world. No, the old books I had collected over the years were typically, Dulac, Dali, Wyeth, Rockwell, Parrish, Caldicott, Aldin, Crane, Disney, Rupert Bear, The Broons, Oor Wullie, The Sunday at Home, and various Victorian annuals which I would pick up at antique book fairs with illustrations created in a time before photos became the media's way of communicating and artists honed their pen and ink skills for a living. I also collected books on general antiques for referencing objects and their details. Detail being a big part of Foxwood because it is those things that people love to look at.

In the early days I remember I did have a couple of comments that a particular object or two was not right so I

made sure that it would never happen again by researching every object I put in a painting. Yes, very time consuming requiring tons of reference material but ultimately worth it.