Strong coffee is brewing. Through an open window, the clatter of horses and drivers' excited shouts can be heard.

So begins another day at the studio.

Horses did clatter through these streets once, and would hardly seem out of place in the neighbourhood today.

While I cannot claim it takes up a whole city block, I do think of my studio as a kind of factory. Orders come in, product goes out. Machines hum all day long and sometimes into the night.

The machines at my studio are:

• PC with 192 Mb of RAM
• flatbed scanner
• black & white laser printer
• CD writer

I work in Windows^®, relying mostly on Adobe Illustrator^®, Photoshop^®, and ImageReady^TM graphic software, and use Microsoft Word^® for word processing.