Chris Alexander, artist and foundation tutor at Canterbury, brought style, wit and a memorably no-messing sensibility to the job of teaching life drawing. And decades later, I remember these things:

How would your figure walk off the page?
Never start a drawing in the corner of a piece of paper (it’ll fall off the opposite corner)
A good portrait study has a subtle element of caricature
Understand how a body articulates
If the person you’re drawing is moving, be patient: people tend to return to the same position
Don’t make scumbly drawings – do a confident line

Chris, sadly, is no more but getting to the exhibition on its last day and chatting with Steven Alexander I was reminded what a stellar draughtsman he was. And how important, and difficult, drawing is. More on the man, his work and the book here.

The travel album came from the ephemera I bring home from trips, often put in a drawer and forgotten – so this is a book of envelopes, one bound with a shoelace to carry on the travel theme and the other with string and a pointing hand discovered on one of the envelopes.

The subversive doilies are a reworking of the teatime, cupcake trend with an edge: this is British Summertime, with a pattern of snowflakes, raindrops and umbrellas.

And ‘Story-weaving’ is an experiment in creating accidental headlines and stories by weaving contrasting newspaper clippings together.

Water City Festival’s Orchestra in a Weekend is a project that’s brought together professional and community musicians for an intensive weekend of workshops leading to a 100-piece orchestra performing at Queen Mary, University of London’s newly-restored 1930s People’s Palace theatre.

A collaboration between the Water City Festival and Queen Mary, University of London’s Centre for Public Engagement, the event programme contains a lot of information. A project of this type is necessarily in development throughout – and with a critical deadline for event materials. So our job was to design a layout, featuring artwork by the festival’s artist Frank Creber, into which copy could be dropped as it arrived and work with the event’s organisers to accommodate change while keeping a constant eye on the press deadline.

The programmes were on-time – and the event was a triumph.