I've been greatly enjoying a five-week course called "Drawing Stories" taught by the fantastic illustrator and animator Joe Evans at Evolution Arts in Brighton.  We've been made to do all sorts of things that don't come naturally to me at all and therefore are quite mind-expanding, always a good thing!  The course is all about the foundations of creating comics and graphic novels so we've been imagining and drawing sequences of events, experimenting with layouts, developing a single concept for different audiences, adding pictures to dialogue and dialogue to pictures, working out storyboards and much more, all requiring new ways of thinking and seeing.  All in just a two-hour sesson once a week.  It's been really challenging, and great fun, and I think it's going to be really helpful for a new project I have in mind.  

How exciting to see my illustrations - fourteen of them - printed across a four-page spread in this cool magazine, Pretty Nostalgic.  I love their ethos, summed up in the motto on the cover:  spend wisely / waste less / appreciate more.   The feature is all about the origin of idioms,  something I quite like, so it was a lovely job to do.

The colouring-in was done with Derwent watercolour pencils, an alternative to normal watercolour.   The subtle colours seemed right for this usage, which I'd originally thought about doing in black and white and felt didn't need shockingly bright hues.  For a stronger colour another time, I might try experimenting with the Inktense pencils in the same range.  

There are a few more pictures from this article on my portfolio page here, but to see them all you'll have to buy Pretty Nostalgic #10, Nov/Dec 2013,  available in WHSmith and many other shops.