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Martin Handford (born 1956 in Hampstead, London) is a British children's author and illustrator who gained worldwide fame in the mid 1980s with his Where's Wally? creation, known as Where's Waldo in the USA and Canada.

Handford began drawing as a child, making stick figures on paper. His inspiration to draw such figures came from classic films and the toy soldiers he played with during that era.

As an adult, Handford worked for three years in an insurance office to pay for his degree at art college. After graduating, Martin worked as a freelance illustrator specialising in drawing crowd scenes for numerous clients.

In 1986, Handford was asked to draw a character with peculiar features. After much thinking, he came up with the idea of "Wally", a world traveller and time travel aficionado who always dresses up in red and white. Wally was joined on most of his travels by a girlfriend who wore clothes with the same colours as Wally's, and by an evil character named Odlaw (Waldo spelled backwards) who dresses in yellow and black.

Handford became a minor celebrity with the success of "Where's Wally". The "Where's Wally" trademark sold in 28 different countries. Beginning in 1987, Handford produced a total of six "classic" "Where's Wally" books, but his character was branched out into other products, such as notebooks, pillows, posters, video games and many others. There was even a syndicated comic strip as well as an animated TV series.

Handford is a methodical and diligent worker. Sometimes it would take him up to eight weeks to draw a two page sketch of the equally reclusive "Wally" and the characters surrounding him.

The "Where's Wally" books were printed in Hong Kong and published for Handford by Candlewick Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A movie based on the "Where's Wally" series of books was planned for filming in 2005 by Nickelodeon Movies, but was cancelled due to a management change at Paramount Pictures.

In 2007, Handford sold the rights to Wally or Waldo to the Entertainment Rights Group, the world's biggest independent owner of children's brands.

The style of art executed by Handford is probably the most famous example of "WimmelBilderBuch" drawings, originally popularised by Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hans Jürgen Press.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Martin Handford", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0