Artist’s lessons draw a big crowd

IT WAS a technique he picked up as he whiled away his youth by scribbling pictures of Andy Capp on the backs of betting slips. Now Pete McKee is adapting it for a new generation of youngsters with unexpected time on their hands.

The popular Yorkshire artist and illustrator, whose clients range from writers to rock stars, has resurrected his cartoon workshops in an online format to arrest the attention of children who had not previously picked up a pen except under teachers’ orders.

The first of his series of fiveminute teach-ins on YouTube went live yesterday from his studio in Sheffield’s Sharrow Vale Road, to what he described as a “frightening” level of interest.

“I don’t know what people are expecting but I hope they’ll be pleasantly surprised or they’ll be coming down the street with pitchforks,” he said.

Despite having attracted more than 10,000 people to an exhibition he mounted in an old industrial warehouse on the city’s Kelham Island two years ago, his online series may play to his biggest audience yet. Participants will be invited to send their own creations for display.

“There’s actually not much to it,” he said. “The lessons take you through drawing very basic

It’s really for beginners, people who can’t draw for toffee. Pete McKee’s cartoon workshops have been revived on YouTube.

cartoon characters, and the mechanics of how faces work in cartoons. It’s really for beginners, people who can’t draw for toffee.

“Any pen will do and it doesn’t have to be posh paper. It can be the back of an envelope.

“That’s what I did when I was five or six. Betting slips, anything. I’d just copy things from comics and my dad’s newspaper.”

He knew then that art would become a career – “that or a policeman” – but it was not until he was 40, 14 years ago and after years as a part-time illustrator and newspaper cartoonist that he gave up his day job at Tesco.

Since then, he has acquired a number of famous admirers, including the members of The Who and Sheffield’s Arctic Monkeys, as well as the musicians Paul

Weller and Noel Gallagher.

But he is most flattered by attention from people with backgrounds similar to his own.

“My artwork is predominantly bought by working class people. Whether it’s a £40 print or someone who’s done well and splashed out on an original. That’s important to me,” he said.

He grew up on the Batemoor estate, in south Sheffield, in a council house whose walls were decorated by the brightly-coloured, stylised pictures of everyday life in the city turned out by the local artist, Joe Scarborough.

Having had no formal training himself, McKee says he is wellplaced to pass his skills on to others who don’t aspire to go to art school.

“I used to do classes in schools and youth clubs, teaching kids how to draw. I’d tell them that the great thing about cartoons is that there are no rules and no need to be anatomically correct.

“Some of the greatest artists in the world use a very basic style. Charles Schulz drew Charlie Brown in Peanuts very simplistically.”

His own influences, he said, were the homegrown comics of his boyhood – Whizzer and Chips, The Dandy and The Beano.