Tell us a bit about yourself.

I studied fine art at Hamburg Academy. I came to England in 1975 and worked as a designer in various agencies but I really considered myself to be an abstract painter deep down. I embraced my role as fulltime illustrator when I was made redundant in 1993. I produced a set of large glossy postcards using StrataVision and PhotoShop 2. These I peddled from shop to shop in London and the South of England. They were soon very successful and sold globally.

This attracted the attention of the poster publisher Athena who wanted to commission a background for one of their posters. I turned this down. But the rejection seemed to encourage them to return and they came back to commission a couple of posters. Both were instant hits, then every publisher wanted one and in the end I had over fifty posters published - mainly created in 3D with fractal elements.

Some became very popular while others didn't make it into reprint, but it all culminated in a book of my work (New Territories), which was published in 1997. At the time it was almost unique. Since then, 3D software has advanced so rapidly, that it makes the work look dated. I am almost glad it's no longer in print.

Why did you end up in the UK?

It’s a long story, but I met my wife when on holiday in the UK. We lost contact and four years later we met again via a series of bizarre coincidences. We took the hint and got married. I liked England, so we decided to live over here.

Are you still creating postcards or posters?

I still do posters, when I am asked, but the market has changed dramatically over the last three or four years. Nearly all the big poster companies have disappeared from the scene, Scandecor, Verkerke, Athena, Wizard & Genius, Cartel and Splash. It’s more about celebrities, film and pop icons at present. Art has become very fringy and I think the days when I could sell 200,000 of one poster are numbered. Yet taste changes and there may be a second time round.

When did you see LightWave for the first time?

I had chosen the Apple Mac as my platform to earn money but there wasn't a great deal of 3D software from which to choose. I saw a demo of LightWave on a Dec Alpha at a computer fair in 1995. I was hugely impressed and considered buying the whole system together with LightWave, but the combined cost put me off and instead I walked home with Animation Master - which I never used.

Then, in 1998, I was hired by a studio to art direct and animate a series of short TV commercials for Lego. One of the animators on the team used LightWave and I was both inspired and a little envious when I watched him turn out complex animated models.

When did you first start using it?

I bought LightWave 5.6 there and then, which had only recently arrived on the Mac and vowed to use only this from then on. Despite having bought every available book on the program, I was so busy at the time that I could barely afford a moment to learn it! I was looking out for a project with enough production lead-time to earn while I learned.

This job came from an advertising agency that commissioned a 48-sheet poster for a large investment company. It was only a couple of words sitting on top of one another and placed in a photographed landscape, but it was a great start. I learned more than I needed to for the job, which added to the reward of the poster appearing on big billboards nationwide.