Artists : Leo Hartas

Leo Hartas was brought up in Seaford and obtained his BA and MA in Illustration at Brighton. His artistic career includes book illustration, theatrical design, 3D modeling, university lecturing and TV animation. His works for DK Publishing, The Apartment Book and Haunted Castle, are children’s classics that have been continuously in print in over a dozen countries since they were published. Leo also illustrated the Tweenies books for BBC Worldwide and King Arthur’s Spaceship for Macmillan, along with many others.

Leo has also written a number of books about videogame art and design which have been published in the USA, UK, France and elsewhere. Shortly before commencing work on the Mirabilis strip, he wrote the definitive work on digital comic books for Ilex Press.

Leo co-founded Creative Attic with Dave Morris and Ivan Richardson, where they created TV and web projects for Endemol, Pearson, Carlton and the BBC. Mirabilis (which they originally were going to call Mythologica) was devised by Leo and Dave in a single evening – and it then took them almost twelve years to find the right publisher and format so they could do it properly.

Leo lives in Somerset with his wife, Jo, their children, and two cats (a big white fluffy one called Dracula, and a tortoise shell called inky, on account of her black, dipped in the inkpot, nose) and too many chickens. He broadcasts every Thursday 9PM GMT, as one of the Bantering Boys on 10Radio.