About Sean

I don’t know when I first started drawing. But I wasn’t born with the talent. Like most kids my age I was given a bunch of crayons and I went nuts. Most other kids wandered off to do other stuff. I stuck with my paper and crayons. I found drawing had power.  I could draw anything and immediately there was always a crowd of interested folks.

Fast forward to university and I was this thin, shy guy
Hard to believe now, but I was so shy that I’d hardly talk to anyone, let alone the girls. But there I was in the cafeteria drawing as usual. And hey it was like my magic potion. No matter where I sat in the cafeteria, the girls would show up. And guess what? They’d speak to me. While all the other kids were wandering off with their plans to impress the girls, I just had to find a corner in the cafeteria, and they would come to me.

I actually drew my way through paying for my university fees and my motorbike
Yup, while still in university, I was able to get work with the newspapers. It was all fun and games, and I spent many fruitless hours going from one newspaper to the next, but over time, I was earning enough to pay my fees, buy my motorbike (ok it was only 100cc, but it got me around) and yes have enough to spend on what I wanted.

I drew my way to my first job as well
I remember walking up to my then-boss, Tannaz Kalyaniwalla (at Chaitra Leo Burnett). I showed her my cartoon portfolio and told her I wanted to be a copywriter. She looked at me through those big teacher-like glasses and said: “You realise of course that copywriting and cartoons are two different things, right?” Sure I knew that. And yet, despite being a newbie, she hired me anyway. Several agencies and copywriting posts later I was out of advertising and back into cartoons. And it all happened because of a night on the beach.

No nothing sleazy happened at the beach…
I just happened to be in Goa, India. And I was there by myself sitting on those warm sands looking up at the stars. And this question popped into my head: “If you were to die this weekend, what would you rather do for the rest of the week?” Ooh, that’s easy, I thought. I’d rather be drawing cartoons. So I got back to my job and I quit.

It was the early days in personal computers
I remember I had a 386 with 200mb hard disk space. And 4 mb RAM (Don’t laugh). And I had to take a freakin’ loan to get that computer because it cost a bomb. My dad did that loan thingy for me, but as banks do, they diddled around and fiddled around. But I got my computer. And for a month it stared at me. I had no idea what I was going to do with the computer, but I’m a big believer of ‘dig your well BEFORE you’re thirsty’. I got thirsty pretty soon. I bought a Wacom tablet. I bought Painter (a very earlier version that actually came in a paint can). And yes, there must have been some version of Photoshop 2 or 3—and Corel Draw. I did some classes with my now good friend CP Nair from Fotosoft, and I was away.

This isn’t my 386. But yeah, it looked a lot like this. And it crashed all day long.

Till the year 2002 when I quit cartoons completely
I wanted to do marketing. I somehow had enough of cartoons. I remember Rob Love saying to me: “I can’t believe you’re throwing away a talent like that.” First, it’s not a talent, Rob. I’ve drawn, and drawn and drawn. I wasn’t born with the skill. I learned it was powerful, remember? So I acquired it. And I wasn’t quitting. Just putting the acquired skill into cold storage. And so it stayed in deep freeze while I built Psychotactics.com and wrote several versions of The Brain Audit.

And then one day it popped out again!

I think it was around the year 2008
I was sitting in a cafe in Paihia in Northland, New Zealand. And I drew these cartoons of people eating “fush and chups” (that’s fish and chips). And that was a small start. Then I started drawing a few of our trips around New Zealand. And then some more cartoons (some which got published on the Google Optimizer blog), and it went from there. But that trickle has now turned into a flood. And it all comes back to my Wacom tablet and Painter.

Yea, we’re coming to the end of this chapter…
I bought myself a Wacom tablet (my wife Renuka stole my other one a few years ago, and I never needed to replace it). And it arrived around the Christmas break. I had well over a month to do nothing but play with it. So I decided to check the latest version of Painter. And fifteen minutes later, I had bought the software and was having a ball drawing cartoons again. Somehow that experience led me to buy some Winsor and Newton watercolours. And some watercolour paper. And I had some Moleskines that had been sitting around. And before you knew it, it was 1999 again. Or 1990. Or 1973.

I was back on the rollercoaster.

Yippeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

You can find me on Facebook. And Twitter. And whatever else they invent in the years to come