EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 9 © 2014 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

2 Bruce Pennington The world’s premier science-fantasy artist takes us on the trip of a lifetime. The greatest memories that I have of painting and drawing are when I used to copy cartoon characters from my weekly comics between the ages of five and eight. To encourage this interest my parents and family friends used to keep me supplied with great rolls of technical drawing paper, coloured pencils and paints. From the age of nine I found a subject that inspiredme like no other—wild birds! I found their fleeting ephemeral nature utterly magical. Somewhere from that early period there’s a drawing I did depicting me as a skinny bespectacled geek standing in a forest clearing gazing reverently up at a sparrow hawk in a tree. I portrayed the bird in almost hieratic terms, with its cruel hooked beak and grim claws reminiscent of the Egyptian falcon god Horus. The