I'm grateful for all correspondence, so please feel free to give me a shout.

Need an illustration? I'm available for commissions!
To contact me please e-mail: david@coolsurface.com

Note: I will make every effort to reply to your e-mails as soon as possible, but please be patient, you know how busy things can get some days! Thanks :)

Now presenting: The Cool Surface.com F.A.Q. !

Q. This site hasn't been updated for ages now, will you be doing it any time soon?

A. No, because this is now the Classic Cool Surface, the archive site! The updates can now be found at and

Q. Can I ask you to draw me something? I'm prepared to pay.

A. Of course, you just said the magic word that every illustrator loves to hear: "pay"! Drop me an e-mail and we can discuss things further.

Q. Hi! I want you to draw me a 28 page comic and come up with the character designs. I can't pay you now but will give you a share of the profit the comic will make.

A. Thanks for the offer, and believe me I'm flattered, but I need to make money to live (I'm thin enough as it is! If I don't get paid I wont be eating at all!). A self published comic *isnt* going to make enough money. You'll be lucky to break-even on your costs. It's sad, but it's a fact of life. Just look at how many comics Marvel has to cancel these days. And they're in a position to make money.

Comics especially take a lot of time and effort to draw, and as much as I'd like to be able to draw just for the fun of it, it's just not feasable.

Q. HI I wANT a PIC OF a HYUGE ROBOT NINJA MONSTUR DRAGONn THING 4 Free!!!!

A. These questions are real believe it or not! If you want a drawing commissioned, that's great, but you need to pay me for it. You wouldn't do your job for free would you? And please, lay off the caps.

Q. Would you mind telling me how to get the colours I want to use in Painter? Every colour I pick seems to keep adding white to the picture...

A. This one bothered me too for a while. If you look near the opacity slider you will see the Resaturation slider which as you may guess, resaturates the image with white, slide it to the left to alter the setting and things will get much closer to how you intended them to look.

Q. Would you mind telling me how to get the colours I want to use in Painter? Some of the colours I pick seem to keep getting darker...

A. Some of the tools do this because the default setting is set to "Overlay". Click on the tool settings and change it to "build up". This will give make it slowly raise to the colour you picked incrementally as opposed to making it about 20 times darker than you'd planned.

All content copyright 2002-2004 (C) David Cousens, unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.You are not allowed to use any of the images on this website without written permission from the author. Stealing, much like country music, is wrong. ;)