Margaret NelsonArtist & illustrator

Illustration for a local authority housing publication. Ink drawing, scanned and coloured.

Digital image, an illustration for an article about nuclear waste. I cheated by combining images found on the web, then Photoshopped.

It would probably work better  with the CND symbol, which is also round, but I like the acid yellow of the radioactivity symbol, which suggests toxicity.

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Digitally altered photograph, taken on a January evening using flash.

Fibre-tip pen drawing on textured paper.

In 1987 there was an accident black spot on the A12 at Capel St Mary, where local people were campaigning for an underpass. I was commissioned by the parish council to produce a road safety poster, which was widely distributed. Capel got its underpass a few years later.

This was pre-Photoshop, so the poster was drawn with pen and ink and a colour separation painted onto an acetate sheet. Layers of texture were added for the shading – you had to peel film off a sheet and stick it on.

This was used as a poster and greetings card to publicise Darwin Day (12th February) 2009, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. Digital image created using copyright-free 19th century engravings and a photograph of clouds.

This is a pencil portrait from the sketch book I used when I was working as a supply teacher. When you meet a class for the first time, and they know you’re only there for the day, some of the kids can take advantage of that by being disruptive. The prospect of being drawn generally encouraged them to behave.

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A watercolour. An idea for a children’s story.

In 2007, Creative Freelance, a group of Suffolk artists, illustrators, copywriters and designers, published a comic book called ‘He Opened his Eyes’. Each of us had two pages to illustrate part of a story written by one of our members. The book can be bought online from Lulu.com.

My contribution was a pair of photo-montages. They’re about looking over someone’s shoulder. The meaning of “when he got back, he couldn’t believe what had happened” is ambiguous. We don’t know what’s happened, or what preceded whatever’s happened. Maybe something’s different about the place he got back to. Maybe there’s no physical evidence for what’s happened, because the sentence refers to something that happened before he got back, or a change in a relationship with another, unseen person. It’s up to you to imagine what happened.

The figure is a friend wearing his characteristic mac and flat cap.  I asked him to pause as he was leaving and photographed him from behind. The interior is my home, when the late afternoon sun cast dark shadows. There’s surf lapping at his feet. The exterior is a church window. The scale of the insects has been altered. The man is unaware of a large beetle on his back; he wouldn’t see it even if he turned around. Where did it come from? Was it waiting for him? In the second montage, it’s dark outside. Moths come out at night.