In between my many other tasks I’ve been working on a 12 page A5 booklet for the Falmouth branch of the Rotary Club for the past few months
. This has been a voluntary project and has meant many hours of unpaid work but I think it’s a good idea. Falmouth Rotary club went to Uganda and with the help of local Ugandan Rotary clubs did a lot of research into how local councils might organise the disposal and recycling of solid waste more effectively.
One of the results was a “Waste Sensitisation Booklet”, written as a resource for people such as health visitors in Uganda to change ideas about waste and recycling. I was asked to illustrate it and it has also been quite a lot of fun to produce – although I wasn’t expecting to have to do the layout as well as the illustrations. All the work was done using the program Illustrator, so that at least some elements could be reproduced, resized and recycled to speed up the process.
I had to be careful to use images that were appropriate to Uganda and spent time researching for instance, just what kind of chickens were commonly kept by the people there, and the cut and colour of a nurse’s uniform. I also had to get to grips with some of the issues involved in the management of waste as several of the illustrations were to show processes, such as how to make charcol briquettes out of vegetable waste, and how to construct a compost heap.

Although it is for a good cause and nice to have more work for my portfolio, I have had to think about whether I should allow the Rotary Club to have the copyright for the pictures. In the end I think that the number of hours I have spent working on the booklet amounts to a very large donation and I would rather keep control of my pictures.
But I did think that perhaps it might be a good idea if there was a picture library where larger charitable organisations could download clip art such as this for a small fee and the illustrators could be paid or perhaps nominate their fees to go to a charity of their choice.