Back in my day, graphic design by hand and pre digital photography.

A long time ago, back in my twenties I drew a short comic strip about a vampire that hunted fascists. Back then in the 1990's everything was done by hand. At the time I was doing a graphic design course on what was known as an employment training scheme, or E.T. scheme. I'd just dropped out of university and was living in the north east of England where jobs were scarcer than cups in the local football teams trophy rooms.
The highest tech on this training course was a photocopier so everything was really done by hand. It was a shit course with a tutor who was just cashing a pay check but it gave me an extra £10 on my dole money. To anyone on these training schemes it was known as the extra tenner scheme but it did give you a qualification at the end of it. Also it was the first time I had anything published. It was one of the government schemes for fixing the unemployment figures as everyone on the schemes weren't classed as unemployed.
I sent a photocopy of the comic strip into a monthly magazine, it was one of those that got the readership to send in the content. I don't remember it's name but they'd given out free copies at a music festival I'd been to and I'd bought copies of it ever since.
I don't have a copy of that comic strip any more or the magazine that published it. I don't have any of my artwork from that time as when I left the fine art course at university I destroyed everything. I chucked my sketch books in the bin and took a hammer to all my sculptures. At the time it was satisfying but now I wish I had at least photographs of what I created.

It's strange but back then if you took a photograph unless you had a dark room you wouldn't see the picture for weeks, until you'd posted off the film and got your pictures posted back to you. Often an undeveloped film would sit in a drawer for months and when you finally sent it in for developing you'd have no clue what was on the 24 frames on the film. Sometimes every picture would come back blank as the film had been exposed to light before it was developed so you'd pay for 24 pictures of nothing.

Even more recently we depended on cameras that used film, this is a photograph that is sitting on my computer table of me and my wife at stonehenge waiting for the summer solstice. We didn't know what images we had until the photographs were sent back so we could have had nothing if anything had gone wrong with the film.

As it turned out I captured the sunrise that morning.

Cameras like graphic design has changed so much in 20 odd years, yet other things have stayed the same. I thought that marching against fascists in my youth would mean they had gone but they have returned. I don't understand why we can make such advances in some things yet always get dragged back by stupidity.