Creator and Destroyer

Question: What is it that I like about fantasy so much and why do I write about it?

Answer: Because of my love of art and the discovery that I had an imagination.  Let me explain…

I’m afraid I need to hold up my hand here and say, ‘I think I have a little bit of a god complex,’ or perhaps that should read ‘gods’. I just love it when you enter a fantasy realm as the normal rules of society are suspended. I love the ability to create worlds, as many as feasible, just the feeling of what’s possible excites me. 

It all started when I was a young lad and a teacher read The Hobbit to us. That moment was a defining one and it’s a good enough place as any to start. 

As the weeks went by, our teacher read to her captive audience. A young Bilbo Baggins made his way forth to the lonely mountain and I fell in love with the idea of imagination. It goes without saying, I was in love with the book we were being read, but it was the realisation that I had an imagination that was really astounding to me. I must have been seven or eight, I really can’t remember. But I do remember the distinct realisation that I had an imagination. Up to that point I just put the random thoughts going through my brain down to watching too much television or something I suppose; Mum was always nagging me about that.

Move the clock forward a little and you come to my next moment of realisation, I liked art. Not stuff hanging in the National Gallery or anything, I was only about twelve. No, I found that, firstly, I enjoyed making pictures and secondly, I was not bad at it. I remember rushing home to show my Dad how I’d learnt to draw using perspective. I spent many happy days, drawing and re-drawing cityscapes again and again just for the love of being a part of the process. It was a joy.

Spin the clock forward another four years. I was studying for an art o’level. My teacher showed me how to draw with Rotring ink pens and suddenly a whole new level of detail was open to me. Shading with dots became a passion. Here was the real start of creating fantasy worlds of my own. I started by populating them with Dragons! I drew Dragons for the next four or five years.

Then things took a step forward in a big way. I went travelling through Egypt for a while. It was my first exposure to a totally different culture, or perhaps I should say two cultures, the old and the new; 4000 years B.C. and present day. But it was the ruins that made the biggest mark on me. When I came home, I took out my pens and created a fantastical version of Egyptian ruins, all pillars and stone slabs. Suddenly I was drawing buildings, lands and maps. I had entered the realm of planet building. Slartibartfast would be so proud.

Then about twelve years ago I did something strange, I switched from PC to Apple. I took a train up to London’s Regent Street and went into the Apple store. I decided, for once in my life to buy a serious computing machine. That trip was one of those moments you flag in your life where your choices have repercussions. Now before you all kick off, I’m not dissing PCs, I owe a huge debt to IBM, huge. Also, everything I do with my Apple computers, you can do with a PC. But it was the impetus that started my foray into CG art. When I switched to Apple I bought server grade equipment. To justify the cost I started to invest, both time and money, into software from the visual effects industry. I still didn’t know what I wanted to create, just that I wanted to make things that didn’t exist. Now, I’m no expert, just a keen hobbyist, but it was through the combination of this hardware and software that I got to realise a dream I’d been dreaming of for nearly forty years - I could build worlds, actual, bleedin’, smegging, worlds! Anything my imagination could come up with I could now take a stab at building. This also meant, anything I wrote about, I could attempt to build in glorious 3D! I could create worlds! Would my teacher who read me that book all those years ago be proud? I like to think so.