Quentin Blake: ‘I’m not so committed to cheering everybody up, you know’ | Quentin Blake | The Guardian

A new BBC documentary, Quentin Blake: The Drawing of My Life, allows for a wider appreciation, opening as it does with the 89-year-old illustrator confronted by 30ft of empty canvas and an invitation to fill it with an artwork that tells the story of his creative life. The broad brush of biography is soon filled in: his 1930s upbringing in suburban Sidcup, south-east London, from where Blake first got his work published in Punch while still at school; his decision to read English at Cambridge rather than going to art school; his 60s career as an in-demand illustrator (his Penguin paperback jackets for the likes of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim have an attractively louche appeal); and as an author himself, most notably A Drink of Water, made with the writer and longtime friend and collaborator, John Yeoman.