Funny Find-It (2003)

Back in 2003 I was a regular contributor to a kids' magazine called Know How!, published by Egmont. One of my assignments was to create a double page spread every month for kids to find various characters in a busy picture called Funny Find-It. Here's one of them, that has an appropriately winter theme for the New Year 2003 edition. Social distancing not a problem 18 years ago of course (although we did catch more colds). Click the picture to see it much larger.

Two of the characters in the pictures were based on the editor, Claire Mewett, and the magazine's designer, Kate Merritt, as they both asked to be included. (Kate is the taller of the two.) The dog was based on my own dog, who sadly passed away later that year age 18.

I really enjoyed working for Know How! magazine. There were no comic strips in it though, so comic fans wouldn't have seen my work there, but I was commissioned to draw lots of illustrations. Every issue was different, with various topics, so it kept everything fresh and lively. Sometimes my art was re-used for free stickers, which was fun. This was back when gifts were cover-mounted, not bagged and hiding the magazine...

Know How! was a great mag to work for and I appreciate Claire for putting so much work my way. Not many of today's kids' mags seem to feature much originated material, tending to use and re-use photos and art from press releases instead, which is cheaper for the publisher but it shortchanges the readers somewhat. You can read more about Know How! in this blog post I wrote a few years back:

https://lewstringercomics.blogspot.com/2013/03/know-how.html