I first started decorating fairground shows and rides in 1979 because I wanted to produce big art in public places. The early work was all brush-painted, inspired by films and cartoons. It wasn't until the end of the 1980's that I started to experiment with an airbrush. Initially I used it to add shading and highlights to cartoon-style figures that had already been brush painted with flat colours. I also used it to shade a lot of the block shadows and scrolls of the traditonal type of fairground decoration that I was producing at the time. Both ways of working were passed on to me from Pete Tei of Tate Decor, who in turn, had learned from the master of traditional Fairground Art, Fred Fowle.

My first airbrush was a cheap Badger hobby airbrush that proved almost useless for the scale of the work involved. It wasn't long before I started to use a DeVilbiss MP Gun - a scaled down spraygun rather than an airbrush - which was much better suited to industrial production - again, the gun used by Fred Fowle and Pete Tei. This lasted me for a few years until I started to produce much more purely airbrushed, large-scale, figurative work. I then used a CompAir Sprayman Pro-77 gun which produced a much more varied thickness of line but was very unreliable. Then I moved on to the brilliant Olympos SGA-6104 which I would recommend to anyone. Beautifully made, with a smooth action and able to produce lines from pencil thin to 2" wide.Unfortunately not readily available anymore.I now use a SimAir XL2000 airbrush with the0.6 setup.

The paints I started with were Woolworths household glosses which were always coated with clear yacht varnish when finished. I then switched to Keeps Signwriting Enamels and then, to Masons Transport Enamels when I began to produce a large volume of work. Until 2001 I used Manor One-Pack Polyurethane paints which are primarily designed for spraying. They still need to have a clear varnish over the finished work.

After a health scare in 2001 I switched to using Polyester base-coats.I had trouble using these with my Olympos spraygun and now use the excellent Sim-air Excel 2000 airbrush for all my work.

Paul Wright, Unit2, South Tees Business Centre, Puddlers Road, Middlesbrough TS6 6TL, UK