Hello, my name is Joe Todd-Stanton, and I was taught to draw by my mom growing up in Brighton, and I'm now working on my ninth picture book. The way I learned to draw, 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 new bits of art and introduce me to new artists. And I think having this kind of opportunity to see how many different types of art and see this kind of whole world of galleries from a very early age gave me a great kind of basis for how I then start to draw and start to kind of explore my own creativity. I think it's interesting, you know, growing up, I kind of ended up making friends with kids who said, "Oh, I loved drawing when I was young, but when it came to kind of picking what I wanted to do when I was older, my parents said, 'Oh, you kind of have to pick a safe option. You maybe should try and become a doctor or something. '" Whereas I think the kind of incredibly lucky thing about my childhood is that if my parents had found out that I wanted to become a doctor, they probably would've been just as angry as if those parents had found out their kids wanted to become an artist. So, I think I've always had this very kind of open, creative, kind of, world to play around in and never feel like art was kind of second best to something more academic. So, yeah, I think growing up, and drawing kind of all just came from that background And then as I got older, kind of finding the things that really inspired me, like very specific artists that I realised I kind of loved more than my parents. And that kind of became my thing. I guess, it's kind of like finding maybe your own kind of musical taste or something like that. You have all these bands that maybe your parents show you, and then at a certain age, you kind of get to go off and explore and go on your own journey to a certain extent. So, yeah, I think all my kind of artistic creativity pretty much just came from really my kind of parents and the kind of great education they gave me growing up.