In 1967, aged 16, I’d just finished my O-levels and was looking forward to starting a foundation course at Batley School of Art. I used homemade scraperboard (wax crayon covered with india ink, which I then scratched into. You could buy a special nib) for the historical characters, which were inspired by a day trip to York but I soon turned to a dip pen with the finest nib I could find.
At the V&A and at Oxford, I was on the look out for illustrations to Dante’s Inferno, which I’d decided to illustrate as a comic strip. Looking back, it’s a shame I didn’t try illustrating it with the scraperboard technique. It would have been more expressive but more difficult to control.