EXTRACTS: Don Lawrence Art (illustrators special) © 2018 The Book Palace (144 PAGES in Full edition)

He hated drawing animals, as he had to use reference… and children. “And women,” he revealed. “I had terrible trouble with women… I couldn’t get them to look convincing. I suppose it was only with Mayfair that I began to get the hang of it.” “That’s why I like inventing monsters. They are so much easier to draw.” “The advantage of having a scriptwriter is that he can make you do things you wouldn’t have thought of. When I did album nine, that I wrote myself, I tended to be indulgent and draw things I wanted to draw rather than here where I’m forced to draw things I haven’t even thought of. You have to have new concepts. You fall flat on your face sometimes, but it’s great fun trying. “If you’ve got a challenge it makes your work much more exciting and interesting. You’re using your head and your brain and your hands… You’ve got to keep stretching yourself. You mustn’t sit back and use clichés all the time. It’s very easy, especially if you’re pushed for time, to fall back on cliché, on what you’ve done before, but you don’t progress if you do that.” “The art I think must be secondary to the storytelling because you’ve got to let the reader know what’s going on,” he later admitted. “I think the mistake a lot of artists make is they indulge themselves in doing a nice picture and forget A page from Lawrence’s ‘The Von Neumann-Machine’ (1993). Look carefully and you will see British prime ministers Margaret Thatcher and John Major playing cards. 32 © Don Lawrence Collection