Hello, I'm Mike Smith, a freelance illustrator/designer who loves drawing stories. To that end I'm studying for an MA in Children's Book Illustration at Cambridge School of Art, UK.

Please feel free to contact me by emailing mike@blogshank.com or calling +44 (0)7734 107 747. Or you can use the form at the bottom of this page.

For five years I lived on a little narrowboat called Barkley, in Cambridge. Then with my partner Caroline (and our two dogs) we spent two years on St Kilda (a boat not the island!) before finding a house in Leicestershire. We miss the life afloat and the Cambridge community, but now at least I have somewhere to put my drawing board, and some electricity for my lovely angle poise lamp.

I started this blog on a whim with a few scribbles back at the end of 2006. It survived through an overland trip from London to Singapore at the end of 2007, during which time I photographed the diary and emailed it to Blogshank HQ (my brother) to be uploaded.

There are plenty of blogs by illustrators in which they upload their latest work, and loads of webcomics, but not many whose illustrations are the blog. The marvellous Lewis Trondheim's Le Petits Riens is the best I can find, and it can be bought in book form in English now (Amazon UK link). I'm currently writing a dissertation about autobiographical comics, and I'll post more details here when it's finished.

I have a friend who works for a geological survey unit affiliated to Cambridge University, who tells me that back in the Fifties they used to take an official recorder on their expeditions. As well as taking records this person used to make sketches of the equipment, the environment, and the team at work. Wouldn't it be great sometimes to do away with the digital camera and reinstate the illustrator?

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