20 January 2012
New Year brings with it a new crop of eager little artists for my primary school art workshops. This term we’re looking at ‘Myths & Monsters’ and to warm up I let them rip (literally) on a very dull musty book I found in the charity shop. The best 20p I’ve ever spent – the resulting layering of the children’s doodles over the Greek Mythology text works a treat. Now that our doodling fingers are well and truly warmed up and paint splattered, we’re looking forward to tackling ‘The man on the moon’ next week. Moons to be made out of lots of squished tin cans. Naturally.
12 November 2011
‘Jacks Radio Mission’ written by Sarah Boland and illustrated here at Wallop, is finally complete! The original project (see here for my earlier blog post about the project) which started almost an entire year ago was the result of an idea by Sarah Boland to create a series of fun books for children going through traumatic cancer therapy treatments.
Today then is a bitter sweet day – the first preview copy of ‘Jacks Radio Mission’, her first story covering radiotherapy, arrived 
in the post from the printers this morning. Apart from a little fine tuning, it’s looking rather wonderful, meaning that the project is reaching completion. It’s almost ready to be sent out into the big wide world!
The bitter part of the deal is that I’m writing this just a couple of weeks after Sarah lost her own battle and passed away.
So I declare today a big fat ‘yay’ day. She did it! I really hope she knows it. I reckon she does, there’s a particularly oddly behaving sun beam outside my window… ;-)
We were helped along the way by staff at the Royal Marsden Hospital whose advise was invaluable and we planned to get the book complete and into the hands of the children entering units such as those at The Marsden by the end of this year and then made available via other cancer aid organizations as well as directly available for purchase through Amazon and the like, as soon as possible thereafter. Any profits will be going straight to leukaemia & lymphoma research.
I shall blog again when I have links to share :-)
In the meantime if you would like more information about how you can help The Royal Marsden, through donations, charitable events or even just giving your time and volunteering, click here.
