Random things

Illustrating for English Language Teaching books used to be reasonable bread and butter work. These days the money is terrible and it’s hardly worth the candle.

The pictures were little, often no bigger than a postage stamp on the page. The brief might run to a couple of paragraphs with a list of the things that needed to be included. It was all very specific and technical; I thought of it as applied drawing.

To make it pay you had to find a style that worked at small scale and didn’t take for ever to do. You could be asked to draw literally anything. I did lots of these little pics and here are just a few of them. They’re not brilliant and they’re not awful. They did the job.