(buoyant music) <v ->Hello, my name is Joe Todd-Stanton</v> and I was taught to draw by my mom. Growing up in Brighton, I was incredibly lucky in the fact that I had two parents that were both super into art. So I had my mom that loved drawing, and then I had my dad who's actually a performance artist. It's quite unlike illustration, but it still meant that he really loved taking me to galleries and see this kind of whole world of galleries from a very early age. Drawing kind of all just came from that background. I think I've always loved this idea, I think this is so prevalent in children's picture books, of a kid from the kind of this normal world that then suddenly finds kind of a portal or a way into kind of a magical realm. Before I became an author, my main thing was that I just loved drawing. That was kind of the thing that I always thought, from when I was a kid, or kind of dreamed that that would be my profession. So I think that was always the main goal, and then once I started doing that, I realised, okay, this is really fun, but I wonder if I could find a way to get all of these things that I love to draw so much and put them into my own story. So I'm not necessarily always drawing what someone else's imagination is trying to create, but being able to give myself the opportunity to draw my own imagination. So yeah, that's how I kind of went from becoming an illustrator to becoming an author. One of the great things when you have your work published is you get these kind of crazy moments of self-reflection where you can think about really specific things from your childhood, or when I was growing up, I ended up being in the same class as the son of Chris Riddell. I ended up having a play date with his son and going to Chris Riddell's house, and I remember just peeking in through a set of double doors to be able to see his studio, and see his drawing table, and just thinking kind of how. It kind of felt like you were looking into like a wizards tower or something. You know, there were all these kind of amazing contraptions that I'd never seen before, and I remember that as kind of being so inspiring. There was a certain point where "Arthur and the Golden Rope," my first picture book, was on a bookshelf alongside a book he'd illustrated, and that was kind of just a magical moment where I could see this whole journey from this one view of his studio when I was a really little kid, to suddenly seeing my books next to his was incredible.