Blasted by my past

Blasted by my past(Warning: Unneccessarily long, dreary reminiscence below:)

I used to do a lot of drawing work for educational publishing companies. In fact, that’s how I learned to draw – I’d get a commission and then have to work out how the heck to achieve this birds-eye view of a working harbour (for example) before the deadline. It was very challenging work for a while, and then, for lots of reasons, it became increasingly frustrating to me. I decided to try to make things better by doing a Masters degree in which I examined why educational illustration was such an irritating job, and then shared my findings with the publishers in a series of workshops. My attempt to change things from the inside was well received, but didn’t really seem to bear fruit, so I decided to make a change and got a job writing comics scripts, started Skinny laMinx, and lived happily ever after.

Aaaanyway, the point of this long sad tale is that earlier in the year I was tempted by the good pay offered for doing two educational posters, so broke my rule about not doing this kind of work. But since accepting the commission, I’ve put off drawing them… until now (at the last minute). I just don’t wanna! Making bags and nice designs is soooo much more fun than posters about Food and Transport!

To try to jolly myself along, I took a photo at the beginning of my working day yesterday, and another at the end. I was right, it did make me feel better, and made me work hard. Amazing, the power of a blog, eh?
11:45 am 5:15pm
Here’s a little closeup or two:
I have to admit, I did have fun drawing this. It’s quite nice to draw people going about their daily lives.

PS: For the record, all my work for educational publishers was not uniformly frustrating. I worked on some amazing projects, and the one of which I’m most proud is The Kagiso Readers series that I co-wrote and illustrated, which has been translated into all 11 of our official languages. One of my co-authors has started a non-profit organisation called Literacy for All that aims to train teachers to use these (and other) books as a valuable aid to literacy. Check it out here.