We start by drawing and cutting out the outline of the character. We do this in order to add realism to the process of cutting out the head and we’re working with the original head, like if it has a mouth, we put a mouth on it and draw in the mouth. We take the neck, we cut it down into a square, a rectangle. For the eyes, we cut down the face into something, like a triangle and we draw in the eyes. The eyes are really the main thing, the eyes are just that thing. So they are the big thing that you need to fill to make a head.
Once you figure out how your head should look, how to frame the whole thing, then you start drawing on paper – and you are always drawing on paper, the heads are never entirely done – you’ll finish a head within a day, and this is the most difficult part of the course. You have to draw a head. Sometimes we’d have to draw four heads – we’d need to be very careful for a lot of reasons… the eyes, the body, the hair, the ears. There are a lot of different ways of moving a head around and in the end, in the end, I got a good head.
So how long was it to start drawing your head?
If you look at the book – I drew my first head on the page. It was the very first head I drew. I still have that pencil sketch of it on the page.
I can’t help thinking you were a bit of an artistic force. When that first head came up, I remember thinking ‘This is very nice, but I’d be able to draw more heads’. You’re a very prolific person, a prolific musician and you’re a prolific artist. What went wrong? What’s next?
That was the next thing that happened, I had this idea for one new project, it came out of nowhere – I’d like to call it a novel. I’d just finished a book, which I really enjoyed, it’s called The Last of the Mohicans – I’m about 45, so that’s about a year and a half since I finished that book – and I had the idea for this new project. It was sort of a weird project. I remember the book, I loved it. I had the idea of writing a new story and there was this great idea about this boy who is going to go on a mission, I don’t remember what the