Important Stories

Want to tell a story that truly matters? Harness the power of visual storytelling—where words and imagery combine to leave a lasting impact.

This is the story of Isi Metzstein, a young boy who escaped pre-war Berlin on the Kindertransport and found refuge in Glasgow. Told through Isi’s own voice, drawn from an intimate audio interview, the narrative reveals the danger he faced, the heartbreaking separation from his family, and their miraculous reunion as they built a new life in Scotland.

The story was brought to life through a powerful collaboration between writer Paul Bristow, myself, and the young people of St Bride’s School. The resulting comic is a moving testament to how learners and creators can work together to illuminate history—preserving voices that must never be forgotten.

All the illustrations were created in pen and ink, hand drawn and the artwork scanned and coloured on Photoshop. Have a look at the short video to see all the pages in Isi’s story. The idea from the leaners was to have the fire punctuate the black and white to show the violence of the fire that destroys his Synagogue,

Narrative Storytelling And Working With Schools

I’ve recently been working with secondary school pupils at St Brides School in East Kilbride with Magic Torch Comics. For this project we are taking excerpts from children that fled Germany in the 1930’s and relocated to the UK.

Key to the learning is to allow the pupils to find their own way through the story and share my experience of illustrating graphic novels. To get them infer from a story’s text, what else could be said and making their own choices in how to best visually tell the tale. .

The short version of Isi Metzstein’s account of how he experienced Kristallnacht was prepared to work with. The two pages you see here have been inspired in part from the classes own work. In my most recent session with the class my two pages inspired from the collaboration was presented to them for feedback.

As the project progresses I will be creating the full version of this story and a another by Dany Metzstein. These stories told as visual narratives will be an important part in telling these important stories to younger people.

Both will be available to read for free at Magic Torch Comics for schools and anyone else interested.

These interviews can be found here and tell of the horror inflicted on these young lives.

High Seas Adventure

Illustrating a children's story is a joy and a learning experience for me, the process of developing the visuals from character, concept layout to finished artwork creates opportunities to develop my existing techniques or learn new ones.  This process I hope ultimately rewards the reader and fully realises the author, publishers and my own vision.  

I think its very important not to get to caught up in my own style and allow flexibility in my approach as openness and the wiliness to try new ideas can also refresh what you can do as an artist. 

Below is a little example, this illustration was created to primary focus on the characters on board the pirate ship, giving space to each personality.  The children's book artwork was rendered in pencil, I played around with layers adding paper textures to give a watercolour style texture to the colour. 

  Please get in touch if you have any questions or would like to be sent samples. 

ILLUSTRATING NARRATIVE

The fun of Illustrating a book is sitting down with the story and imagining what the characters and the setting will look like.  Sometimes the outline is descriptive but still open to interpretation, other times I've got free reign to come up with ideas and solutions.  My task is to visualize your text and enrich the experience for the reader by first sending you the character design illustrations for feedback and then getting to work on the interior draft.

Below is the opening chapter and my illustration, hand rendered in pen and ink to accompany it.

Allow me to introduce myself -my name is Lawrence Pinkley, I'm a private detective. There aren’t
many eighteen year old detectives in Whitby, in fact, I'm the only one, but not by choice. I found myself pulled to the cold north east of England following the death of my father, when I unwillingly inherited the Pinkley Investigation Group, or PIG for short.