Author, How to Cheat in Photoshop, 3e Graphic Artist/Illustrator, Contributing Editor for MacUser magazine and author/journalist, London, UK	September 2006
	What I want is a virtual headset, so I can sculpt with 3-D clay on my computer. I’d like to be able to reach out and touch objects and move them around and manipulate them without having this ridiculous mouse / keyboard interface.

When I googled you I found out that besides being a famous author you are a freelance illustrator and graphic artist who has been published in many UK newspapers and magazines. I read that you specialize in satirical photomontage. Can you elaborate on what that is?

It’s something that newspapers are quite big on in this country, partly because I’ve pushed them in that direction. It’s illustrations of features, but because it’s photographic rather than drawn, the effect is midway between a photograph and a cartoon. A lot of the humor comes from the fact that at first glance it looks like a photograph, but then you realize it can’t be.

You must have to have a good sense of humor to specialize in satirical photomontage?

Yes, that’s right. I think a sense of humor is important for any writer, whether it’s books for diets or books for Photoshop users. You know you have to recognize that a lot of the people reading these books want to get fun out of it as well as information.

You’re also a contributor to MacUser. How long have you been doing that?

I’ve been doing that for maybe 20 years now.

How long have you been using Photoshop? Since its inception in 1991?

I’ve been using it pretty much from the beginning. Before that I was using Image Studio, which went on to become Color Studio, and then turned into Painter, and a program called Digital Darkroom, which isn’t here anymore.

I read that you are one of the most sought-after editorial illustrators in Britain, and you have called yourself an “unqualified success” because you don’t have a degree in fine arts or graphic design. Did you earn a degree in something else?

I have a degree in philosophy.

Philosophy? What were your intentions with that degree?

I had no intention whatsoever. Those were the days when you went to the university to have fun and you knew plenty of jobs would be there when you left. When I left the university in 1980, Margaret Thatcher had just come into power in Britain, and oh, by the way, no jobs left! It was a bit of a shock.

What kind of job did you want when you finished school?

I didn’t give it a moment's thought. You know, you fall into something by accident. What I ended up doing was getting a job playing piano in a local restaurant.

Really? Did you sing too?

Oh, I wish I could sing. I have a voice like a demented frog.

How long did you play the piano?

I did that on and off for a couple of years, but the manager of the restaurant left to start a local listings magazine. I thought that sounded like fun and I started it with him. He got bored with it and dropped out after four issues, and I kept it going for about five years.

What happened next?

I moved back to London, where I was born, and I got a job with the Museum Association, editing their publications. In 1987 desktop publishing appeared and I realized that I could actually put a magazine together myself without employing typesetters and all that stuff. I started a satirical magazine called The Truth.

What was that about?

It was kind of an English version of National Lampoon, if you remember that. Back then National Lampoon was a very sharp, cutting-edge magazine. I won a couple of awards for The Truth because it was the first desktop published magazine in the UK. One of the awards I won came with a prize of a video camera, a digitizing board to go in the computer and two programs, Digital Darkroom and Image Studio. That is what got me into messing around with photographs.

When did you discover your artistic talents with computer arts?

Well, I had been using computers to do the graphics for my magazine. It wasn’t until I closed down the magazine that I had all this computer equipment left over. I met the editor of the magazine Punch, which was an English humor magazine that had been going for about 250 years and had a very venerable pedigree. I said to him, “Look, isn’t it interesting what you can do with computers these days?” and he said to me, “Do an illustration for next week. We’re doing a story about the Queen’s speech when she opens the House of Parliament.” And then he offered me a page a week. Soon after the Guardian phoned up and said, “We want one of those; do one for us once a week.” And it went on from there.

Did you just focus on illustrations at that point?

I was also doing freelance magazine design, mainly for trade magazines that needed re-designs. That was fun.

Do you have other artistic talents? Do you ever do any of your own photography?

I do my own photography when I have to. I have a decent camera and am a reasonable amateur photographer. I use the camera to get the basic images into Photoshop.

You must have an amazing collection of images.

I have a huge library of images; I have about 1000 CDs of images. I also have subscriptions to a couple of photo libraries. I’m always gathering images and taking a lot of my own pictures as well.

You work on very tight deadlines. When I tried to schedule this interview you didn’t know if you could schedule 45 minutes one week in advance. How do you come up with ideas so quickly and maintain a certain level of creativity?

Adrenaline, it’s a fantastic drug. I love tight deadlines. I find them very exciting. My usual newspaper deadline is about 3 hours.

What is the tightest deadline you’ve had?

The tightest one I ever had was for a very large front page illustration for the Independent newspaper, where I had forty minutes.

Can you do any preparation in advance for your illustrations? Do they usually tell you exactly what they want, or do they leave it open?

No, you can’t do anything in advance because you never know what the story is going to be. Sometimes they have a fair idea of what they want. And sometimes they leave it up to me. I prefer it when they leave it up to me. Usually I get commissioned either by art editors, in which case they’re people who think visually and we can talk through ideas, or by section editors, the words people, in which case it’s usually the first cliché that pops into their heads.

What is a typical day like for you? Do you wake up each morning without a clue of what to expect?

Yes, pretty much. I usually don’t get calls from newspapers until the afternoon. They’ll phone up at maybe one or two o’clock, so I’m usually busiest in the afternoons. For the magazine work there is a much longer deadline so I get a couple of days to work on a story. That’s why I started writing books, so I could have something to do in the time in-between.

What’s the best part of your job?

Getting the phone call from a newspaper to saying the work looks fine, I can stop now. That’s lovely, a great feeling.

Do you enjoy working with specific types of images? I noticed you use a lot of images of people.

I do like working with people because it’s intriguing. There is an awful lot you can do with people. Newspapers and magazines send me mug shots of politicians, sports figures or other celebrities. They are always grinning at the camera. I put them on different bodies in different situations. If there are two people or more then I make some interaction with them and that’s often done simply with eye contact. I move their eyes around so that they’re looking at each other or looking in the same direction so that there’s some interaction between the people, and that’s the part that I find intriguing.

Is there someone else that does what you do that you admire?

There’s an illustrator called Max Ellis, who does very similar work. They seem to use him and me interchangeably in newspapers. It’s always good to see a piece that he’s done because it looks so much like the work that I do. I can see the work that’s gone into it.

Do you know him personally?

Yes, I’ve met him a few times. There is also an illustrator called Derek Lea, who is based in Ontario, Canada. Beautiful, beautiful work. It’s the kind of work that’s so methodical, so painstaking, and absolutely beautiful. I really envy his artistic ability. He's writing a book about his work, to be published by Focal Press - I can't wait to get hold of it!

How did you come to write the first edition of How to Cheat in Photoshop?

I occasionally lecture at universities and colleges and I was doing a series of talks at the University of Westminster and a student said to me, “Why don’t you write a book?” There are dozens of books on Photoshop, and I went into a bookshop and I looked at them. The trouble with all the books I looked at was they go through the program menu by menu, feature by feature, telling what each one does. That is not the way you work in Photoshop. The way you work is to start off with what you want to achieve and then work at how to get there.

And that’s how you wrote How to Cheat in Photoshop? You were writing it to illustrate how things are done as if you are working on a deadline…the fastest and easiest way to get the end result?

Yes, it’s working backwards from where you want to go and showing them how to get there. So rather than simply showing what each Photoshop function does, How to Cheat in Photoshop takes the viewpoint that there's a specific effect you want to achieve, and shows you how to get there. It's a bit like the difference between a road map and a satellite navigation device: I don't show you all the routes; I just show how to get to where you want to go!

You wrote in the Foreword, “I know you’re not going to read this from front to back.”

Exactly, this kind of book isn’t read like a novel. I put in a couple of introductory chapters just to get everyone up to speed with the book. I originally wrote the book assuming that people who bought it would have a reasonable working knowledge of Photoshop. As it turns out, that’s not true. Feedback from readers was that there is a lot of basic stuff that they don’t know. Even experienced graphic artists who use Photoshop all day long don’t know some of the basic techniques.

I visited the website for this book www.howtocheatinphotoshop.com, and I noticed that you include a forum where readers can ask you questions directly.

Yes, I thought this was good because there is an interchange with readers and myself, and I can get ideas on how to make the next edition better. I can see what people want. I don’t know why more authors don’t do it; I suppose it’s probably the time that it takes up. With almost any kind of instruction manual you get stuck, and rather than scratching your head and trying to work out how to do something you can email me or post a message on the forum. Very often what happens is that other readers will answer the questions before I get a chance to get there.

How to Cheat in Photoshop also includes a CD?

Yes. As well as all the Photoshop files needed to do the work-throughs in the book, the CD includes 100 free high resolution images and a load of QuickTime movies of me demonstrating some of the examples in the book. I always feel that showing readers how to do something is a lot better than merely telling them!

Is the current edition for CS2?

That’s right.

Does it also apply to earlier versions of Photoshop?

It does. I get asked that question a lot. I think maybe 5% of the book is specific to CS2. I get a lot of readers who only have Photoshop Elements, which is the cut-down version of Photoshop. They are using the book because they can still use an awful lot of the techniques and they like the ideas.

Are the samples and ideas that have been deleted from the previous edition kept somewhere for reference?

All the pages I took out of the second edition I put on the CD as pdfs in the third edition.

Do you plan on writing a fourth edition?

Oh, yes, certainly. We're also looking at replacing the CD with a DVD, so I can fit in a lot more video tutorials.

Will you be doing your job the same way in five years, but with a newer version of Photoshop? How do you see things changing for computer graphics?

Oh, very good question! The really simple answer is I have no idea what I’ll be doing in five years time. One of the reasons that I enjoy tight deadlines so much is because I don’t know what I’m going to be doing tomorrow morning, much less next week, or five years from now. Writing the books has been the only time in my working life when I have to think more than a couple of weeks ahead.

That’s a refreshing perspective. I think most people like the stability of knowing what the future holds.

I hate planning for the future. I just wait and see what happens. Stability bores me. Who really needs stability? We need impermanence and excitement.

And how do you see things changing for computer graphics?

Well, I’m sitting in front of a television screen that hasn’t changed much in the last 100 years, using a typewriter keyboard that was invented in the 1870’s, and using a mouse that was invented in the 1960’s. I think the interface has to change radically. It’s all got to become much more immediate.

Can you elaborate on how the interface could change?

What I want is a virtual headset, so I can sculpt with 3-D clay on my computer. I’d like to be able to reach out and touch objects and move them around and manipulate them without having this ridiculous mouse / keyboard interface.

If you didn’t write books about the next version of Photoshop, would you still look forward to the next version?

Absolutely. As an example, there is a feature in CS2, the current version of Photoshop, which gives you the ability to warp an image in a way that was not possible before. That has completely changed the way that I work. It has made several aspects of my job far, far easier than they ever were before.

Does it allow you to do better work?

I can do better work and, more significantly, I can do the same work more quickly.

What’s the best professional lesson you’ve learned so far?

When people phone up and say, “I’ve got a simple job for you” these jobs are always, without exception, the most difficult jobs. I don’t know why that is, but every single time someone says a job is simple they are always unbelievably difficult.

What has been the peak experience of your career so far?

Writing How to Cheat in Photoshop. I think that is my life’s work. I’ve really put my soul into that book. It gives me a huge amount of pleasure to be able to help people from all over the world. The reader forum we spoke of earlier is extraordinary. There was a debate going on recently between a 14 year old schoolboy in England and a dentist in his 60s from Michigan. These people are able to interact on equal terms in the forum. They have nothing in common other than their shared interest in Photoshop…I find that fascinating.

Do you have other books in the works right now?

Well, I’ve just finished another book called Stuff the Turkey: How to Survive Christmas with Your Family. That will be coming out in the UK the end of this year.

Will that be published in the United States as well?

We don’t have an American publisher for it yet, our agent is working on it.

I read that you wrote another book of similar vein outside the realm of computer arts called How to Be the Coolest Dad on the Block.

Yes.

How many kids do you have?

I have two boys, aged 15 and 12.

So you have another side of life.

I love my work, but at the end of the week I turn my computer off and I do not turn it on again until Monday morning. I never, ever work the weekends.

Is that hard to do as a freelancer?

Everyone I work for now knows that I don’t work the weekends. If I get a job on a weekend I turn it down. The first time you do that it’s very, very hard. But they always come back!

You obviously have the reputation and experience to be able to do that.

I have never missed a deadline, and that is the most important thing when you’re working for the newspapers.

Are you interested in writing books of another subject for Focal Press?

Click here to email this article to a friend
Click here for more information on How to Cheat in Photoshop, 3e
Click here for the How to Cheat in Photoshop Web page