Clearing the picture: (Jim Sharp invents a process to enhance picture reproduction in newspapers).

Having a clear head and spending more evenings at home led Jim Sharp, a commercial artist from Liverpool, to the invention of a ground-breaking process to enhance picture reproduction in newspapers.

`Liverpool is a real community and an exciting place to live,' he says. He was born and raised in Toxteth, an area of the city that has since achieved a negative fame for its riots. `We were a very close-knit family--with aunts and uncles and cousins living back to back with us and Nan (grandmother) in the next street.'

One day, on the way to school when he was about 12, he saw a sign writer working at the top of a ladder. `He was hand-lettering a wonderful sign. Then and there I decided that was what I wanted to do when I left school.' He persuaded his parents to let him enrol in the Art High School, where half the day was spent studying art. `Everyone leaving there was snapped up by the advertising industry,' he says. At 16 he started work in an ad agency and within five years he and his friend Stan McCaffrey had started their own commercial art studio, McCaffrey and Sharp. `At 21 I looked too young to be in business, so I grew a beard,' he jokes.

By the time he reached his early thirties the studio was a success, employing more and more staff, and he and his wife Rita had settled in a nice house in a pleasant suburb. `I thought life was great, that the world was my oyster and that it would go on for ever.' But there was a problem. More and more frequently the working day would end up in the pub `for a swift relaxing drink--anyway that was the theory. The truth was that often the beer would flow late into the night.' His habit was becoming serious and beginning to cause arguments at home.

Sharp's wife Rita had got to know two Canadian women at a women's group she attended. Soon they were frequent visitors to the Sharp home and eventually invited Rita to a weekend in London to see an MRA musical show. On the spur of the moment Sharp decided he would go too. `No drinking and two days on your best behaviour--can you cope with that?' Rita flung at him.

`That made me all the more determined to go!' he says.

The show and the weekend had a profound effect, as did a booklet he was given. `It opened my eyes and made me rethink the way I was living,' he recalls. `I was challenged to think what I really wanted from life. Things were not right at home, so I decided that changes were needed.'

As well as having two children of their own the Sharps had been acting as foster parents for others--`45 over a period of 12 years, not all at once'--and he had left this `too much' to Rita. He decided to give her more support and also to stop drinking. The biggest difficulty with the latter decision was not stopping but coping with his friends' reactions.

Slowly things began to improve at home. `We became a closer family unit. When someone asked my wife if I had changed, she said it was like Jekyll and Hyde!'

One evening at home, he came up with a totally new idea of how to make photographs clearer in newspapers. He talked with Rita about it into the early hours and the next day registered it at the patent office.

The process, which he called Schafline High Definition, was taken up by advertising agencies all over Britain. A separate company was formed and before long overseas franchises had been established in New York, Paris, Madrid, Sydney and other cities. Over 120 jobs were created.

By the early Nineties new computer technology had made the process redundant. But Sharp had already begun to move into a new speciality--3D graphic printing. Today his techniques in this field are also in demand internationally. His Pinsharp 3D Conversion system has been used, for example, by KelloggsAustralia, Disney Paris, Ladybird Books, News International and BBC Worldwide--printing 3D dinosaurs.

`Jim Sharp represents a glowing ember of the imaginative and entrepreneurial spirit that once made Liverpool so great,' wrote a Liverpool Daily Post columnist. Sharp himself says, `It's amazing how a simple decision can change your life and that of others too. I dread to think what would have happened if I hadn't gone to London. I would probably have carried on drinking till I became an alcoholic; Rita would probably have left me; Schafline would never have been invented; and 150 jobs would never have been created.'