I'm a cartoonist, and although I've been drawing all my life (as cartoonists usually have been), it's only fairly recently that I started getting paid for it. But I did, so that officially makes me a professional freelance illustrator! Sounds almost respectable when you put it like that, doesn't it. What it means is that if you - yes, you - want me to draw something, and you say "hey Dave, I want you to draw me this thing" and we arrange a price, I'll draw it! Unless I say no! It really is that simple to make me do things.

I draw either in pencil or ink, both of which styles are represented on this page and in the galleries on the website, and then I colour digitally. I'm taking commissions, so email me at dave@davebulmer.com if there's something you'd like me to do.

I do draw my own original comics as well as working for other people. The first issue will be available soon, and you'll see information about it all over this website when it is.

The reason I mention it here is that the comic is partly my tribute to being twelve years old, which was the sort of age when I really started to get together the kinds of characters and comics I was going to be drawing for the rest of my life. It's a celebration of that kind of comic you can only draw when you're too young to worry about doing it properly (except done properly). You could say I've been developing the comic since I was eight, which was when the deputy head at my primary school, Mrs Bailey, agreed with my teacher that it was very naughty of me to have started to use school time to write and illustrate a novel about a tomato instead of learning. She suggested the best punishment - and I'm sure I detected some tiny hint of a wink as she said it - would be to make me see the book through to completion.

From then on it was clear what I was going to be doing for much of the rest of my life. Different variations came and went, but I was always going to tell stories and draw cartoons in some way, and that's what you find me doing now.

Although this website is mostly visual - because it just looks better that way - I'm also a certified writer, which you can take any way you wish. I graduated from Liverpool John Moores University with a degree in Imaginative Writing. I did quite well, too!

Although I don't do any professional work as a writer at the moment, it is what I do on the side, and I'm working up to submitting some short stories to magazines pretty soon. I'm still trying to work out what samples of my writing I can put up on this website without harming my chances of selling some, but if as you read this there aren't any samples currently available, it just means I'm getting something ready.

I do have a few longer written projects on the go, as well. I'm writing a novel, but who isn't? Actually I'm writing two, but the main one usually wins out in the battle for my attention.

The problem with being educated on the subject of writing is that I am all too aware that good writing is brief and to the point, and yet here I am having to ramble because the nice picture I've drawn is much taller than any paragraph I could reasonably write on the subject of having been to university.

So that's who I am, but no About Me page would be complete without due credit to my girlfriend Abby. We live together in Manchester and have done for a while. We work as a sort of professional couple, in as much as illustration can be considered professional. She's been in it longer than I have and you can see her work at www.abigailryder.com. As you can probably tell from the URLs here, Abby hosts this website and indeed showed me how to make one.

So I spend my working day drawing and writing, and the rest of the time being generally happy.

And drawing...

...far too tall...

...pictures.