So this time I knew what to expect, and and did things a little differently. Somehow I was  still right up against the deadline, though, and only got the package shipped off via Parcelforce 48 hour service at lunchtime today. It'll be in place at the weekend, at which time all will be revealed! I'll be up there for the festival in a couple weeks, and hope to be happy when I see it in situ for the first time. 

Today, this arrived from the printer.  Just a Normal Day? - a choose-your-own-pathway interactive comic about small kids and self-employment.

It's the culmination of many years of thinking and planning and starting and stopping, and finally a few very intense months of drafting, drafting, re-drafting, inking, colouring, and formatting. 

It's a little hard to believe it's really moved from being mostly in my head for over a decade, to being real little books in my house. 

I'm happy to admit this probably wouldn't have happened this year (or even next year or the year after, judging by past experience) without a far more organised approach to getting on with creative work, taught by Jessica Abel earlier this year. 

It's all about focus on one thing, asking yourself the right questions, breaking down projects into definable steps, finding a good way to stop losing ideas, figuring out what's really possible in a given time, planning and reviewing and being accountable, and much more. It worked. If you have things you've been meaning to do forever and keep getting stuck, this could really help! 

A new Belgian fries restaurant called BeFries which has just opened in Brighton wanted line drawings showing the whole process from potatoes growing to chips in a cone, to be chalked on their blackboard wall three meters wide. 

It took some trial and error to get all the elements in reasonable scale relative to each other, and balanced in a way that would flow and make sense with enough spacing including room for the text. It was fun drawing the cool cutting machine (I wanted to write hand-cutting as it's operated by pulling the lever, but that just sounds bad!).

The day of the actual chalking involved a projector, with my line drawings changed to pink so I could see where I was, and joining the whole picture up from two halves as it was too wide to project as one image.  

This was a fun job, working for a lovely bunch of guys making a truly delicious product!