Drawing a good picture is like telling a really good lie - the key is in the incidental detail.

Good and bad ideas both come from the same fountain of speculation and experiment.

The detail adds an element of unexpected something. All fiction is false; what makes it convincing is that it runs alongside the truth. The real world has lots of incidental details, so a painting also has to have that element of imperfection and irregularity, those incidental details.

Illustrating is more about communicating specific ideas to a reader. Painting is more like pure science, more about the act of painting.

I actually started out as a writer and then converted to illustration because I realised that there was a dearth of good illustrators in genre fiction, at least in Australia at that time.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.