Tony Colley is one of those Illustrator / Cartoonist / Comic Artist type situations

Tony Colley has been drawing ever since he was old enough to hold a crayon and not immediately eat it. As a toddler, he often got into trouble for scribbling on the walls and the furniture and the dog.

At school, his teachers told him drawing funny pictures could be a career. Of course, he didn’t believe that for a second and went on to have a number of weird jobs like checking bus timetables, designing horse websites and putting those little numbers in the corners of receipt books. He often got in trouble for drawing on the manilla folders and the expense reports and the dog, and for bringing a dog to work.

Eventually he realised that a career doing the thing he loved was still waiting for him, and now his vibrant, offbeat illustration work appears in books, magazines, video games and on the web.

He's even taught sequential art in children's draw-along workshops at Australia’s National Cartoon Gallery. The kids asked him what ‘sequential art’ meant and he mumbled something about 'covering all the search engine keywords in my website's about page'. Then they asked if he 'was allowed to bring a dog into the gallery’ and ‘wouldn’t a whiteboard bark less’ and he said ‘class dismissed’.

Tony lives in Coffs Harbour, NSW, Australia with his family.