Mike Payne is best known as the creator of ranges and concepts of hugely successful characters and licensed merchandise known across the world.
Biography:
After 26 years in the civil service, Mike Payne broke free and became a renowned international award-winning cartoonist and illustrator. A chance event when the art director of Athena International (greetings cards) happened upon an open portfolio of Mike’s cartoons resulted in the launch of a new career and Athena buying everything in the folder. Mike is now one of the UK's leading and most respected experts in the world of commercial humour, greeting card design, books and gift concept development. Images and creations from the many characters he has created have an immediate and instinctive appeal, and it is estimated that greetings cards featuring his creations have sold in excess of ten hundred million worldwide.
When Mike was a small child people used to say that he could draw before he could walk! Mike was always drawing and found inspiration for his cartoons from Disney and Giles. When he was asked to create a bear with a great depth of feeling for the then newly formed company Carte Blanche in 1987, working under his pen name of “Miranda”, Mike created a phenomenon.
Mike's 'Tatty Teddy' character for the 'Me to You' concept (the charcoal bear with the blue nose), together with other unique creations, have won numerous awards in the USA, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and, of course, the UK. Mike has travelled the world doing many “signings” and after seventeen years of drawing the teddy bear, in 2004, decided the time was right to move on to pastures new.
Mike’s latest concept Charlie’s Ark, (www.charliesark.co.uk) has taken over four years to develop. Greeting cards, cross-stitch kits and two different varieties of paper-craft are now on sale. The First Collection of Charlie’s Ark children’s stories was released in November 2009 by Andrews UK as an Audio-book CD and the Second Collection of stories was released recently.
The humour continues in the form of "The Wine Buffs" which is a range of amusing greeting cards on sale throughout the UK.
A lecturer at schools and colleges, with many TV appearances to his name and a passion for professional acting, Mike is a sought after and original public speaker. His time as Sky News cartoonist in 1999 was the perfect environment to entertain and promote the art of cartooning, for which he is globally renowned.
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