My life and my collecting are so entwined that you can’t have one without the other; so prepare yourself for ‘War and Peace’.

My love of dragons and weird creatures stems from way back in my childhood when I was given my first dragon named Custard (I should mention at this point that I was born in the depths of the Devon countryside surrounded by fields, woods but alas no children), so there was only Custard, me and my imagination. Custard was my constant companion and co-conspirator in many adventures, don’t be fooled by his looks, he was very fierce and together we defeated the very worst my imagination could muster. We were inseparable until I reached the age of six and my younger brother hit three. Custard was resigned to the toy box; I had a living, breathing playmate.

Together we would build ingenious traps to capture the nasty little fairies who lived at the bottom of the garden or hide under the foot bridge and jump out on unsuspecting walkers shouting ‘who goes trip trapping over my bridge’, many of whom didn’t find it as funny as we did. (‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ instigated this game)

Along with our imaginary creatures were the ‘real’ creatures; the monster with the big bulging eyes who lived in the cupboard, the one with long bony fingers hiding under the bed and a whole host of things that lurked in dark corners. These images were to shape my collecting.

As we grew older we progressed from trolls and fairies to screwdrivers and hammers, we dismantling anything we could get our hands on.

My next dragon arrived just before my sixteenth birthday. I bought my first motorbike, well, in a manner of speaking, what I actually bought was a dozen boxes of rusty, oil covered bits. It didn’t matter to my brother and I, armed with a Haynes manual we set about rebuilding it. With a lot of determination, hard work and some help we’d rebuilt and re-sprayed a FS1E capable of the amazing speed of 55mph. On the tank was my pride and joy, a beautiful airbrushed dragon. I later had the same design sprayed on board as a lasting memento

With my newfound freedom I spent the next ten years touring England and Europe, during these trips I accrued many odd creatures, trolls, goblins, dragons etc, if they were weird and affordable they came home with me.

At 26, after years of my dad nagging me to get a proper job, a self-employed designer/illustrator was not a proper job in his opinion (or was it the fact that I only worked enough to keep petrol in my tank?), I secured a place at University. The train journey to and from was long and boring and after falling asleep and whistling past my station for the umpteenth time I took up reading as a preventative measure.

My first discovery was Anne McCaffrey and the Dragons of Pern. Although the magnificent thread destroying dragons and their riders were at the heart of her books, it was the tiny fire dragons, which caught my attention more. I was on a mission; I wanted and needed a fire dragon in my life.

After exhausting all of Anne McCafreays books I found The Wrath of the Ice Sorcerer; one by one, more excellent creatures joined my collection. My next grant cheque arrived, bills paid, materials bought and enough left over for Ogrod. What greeted me nearly knocked my socks off; a whole widow full of tiny multi coloured dragons and right in the centre was my fire dragon. Ogrod forgotten, I bought the Fire dragon and the Ice dragon, my collection had begun. It grew by one or two per grant cheque until recession forced the closure of the shop.

This is where my collecting took a break but my dragon collection continued to grow. I had a small collection of Genesis Dragons but in the eyes of friends and family I was a dragon collector per se. Every Christmas there would be another blue dragon that puffed smoke or a purple, plastic one covered in glitter, bless them, NOT

In the late 90s a set of unfortunate circumstances meant giving up work and returning to Devon. This move coincided with the birth of ebay.co.uk. I sold most of my creatures and bought Genesis dragons; it was like a ‘Swap Shop’ for adults.

Apart from my Genesis Dragons and an odd one or two, the rest of my collection lives in the garden (where nature has the job of dusting them) and are too numerous to photograph but include witches, wizards, trolls, goblins, pixies, Dennis the Menace and friends, griffins, dragons and a few other things which I’m not sure what they are but they were odd so I bought them.

The sketches you see are of some of my childhood monsters, they were transferred from my subconscious and committed to paper for a brief at Uni. The dragon is of course Custard. My intention is to ‘tweak’ these and the others and cast them in concrete so they can lurk forevermore in dark corners.