There's a small charity in town, run by and for people with disabilities, which I've been involved with a little over the past few years. For one thing, I'd have lunch every Wednesday at their pop-up community cafe which provides their members with work experience in cooking, serving, operating the till, etc. And I've hosted an art table there for a while, for anyone who wanted to come do some drawing or painting. 

So when I was asked to create a fundraising ad to appear in our town mag, Viva Lewes, which goes free to many thousands of people, I was delighted to say yes.

It had to be half of an A5 page, and be somehow Christmassy for the December issue (which is out now, of course) and be foodbank-focused. Other than that it was up to me,  although they did want it hand-drawn, including all the wording, to stand out from the rest.  

The rough sketches were happily approved. But I suddenly realised that a red circle in the centre of a white rectangle would look like.... the flag of Japan! Nothing wrong with Japanese flags, but not exactly what we needed here. 

Someone suggested a Christmas pudding instead to hold the wording. It was harder to get the text to fit nice and legibly onto this shape, and as this was in fact the whole point of the exercise, I kept making the pudding base broader until it worked. 

I thought about using a limited colour palette instead of full-colour, and as brown would now be included I took an earlier draft and tried a lighter shade for the background. It was just too dull.  Just to make sure, I experimented with a blue background, which seemed somehow too sky-like, and an orange background, which just didn't make any sense at all. 

So in the end, I did keep to only red and green and pudding-brown, using darker and lighter shades of each, and leaving as much white as was reasonable, for brightness. In the interests of the "hand-drawn" look it was all done by eye, no rulers or measuring involved but if I were to do it again, I would be a lot more accurate with the lettering!  

Last I heard, the fundraising was going well, on the way toward the target, and I'm happy to have played a part in that. 

In early May, while attending one of Gosh Comics' wonderfully entertaining and enlightening evenings, I heard they were planning a zine to give away at London Pride and were inviting submissions on any sort of LGBT theme. I had no ideas at the time and nearly dismissed the thought as impossible and too short a deadline, but suddenly this came to mind and I managed to draw it up over a couple of late nights, just in time. 


I was thrilled to get their email saying they really liked it and would print it. To be honest, I don't know how many submissions they had to choose amongst, but I'd like to think it was more than the pages available! In any case, it was a delight to be able to make a small contribution to the occasion.  


And I proved to myself that I can, occasionally, produce work quickly if I just get down and do it.  

Now to get on with the three or four half-drafted comics on the go in various notebooks....  Watch this space. 

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. 

I'm happy to see this has just come out in the town magazine Viva Lewes.  That potato salad - based on my mother's way of doing it - is a really good one, even for people who say they don't like potato salad.   By the way, if you want to make it like my mum's recipe, just add some chopped apple.  My boys objected strongly to this  (although they love apples) so this is our version.