Why is a raven like a writing desk?

A couple of months ago I decided to clean out the Freegle (once named freecycle) folder in my email. If you’ve not heard of it, Freegle is great, it’s an email list of people who offer up unwanted items, free, to anyone who emails them with a request and can pick the item up themselves.

Every time someone makes an offer, it sends out an email to registered users, who then in turn respond with a (hopefully) polite request for said item. Now, as a freelance illustrator and writer whose time is usually consumed with drawing, writing and more drawing, the only problem is that my Freegle folder fills up faster than I could ever possibly keep track of all the offers.

I recently left my job as a full time 2D, 3D and concept artist with Sheffield games studio Sumo Digital, and set up on my own as a freelancer. This has proven to be one of the most enjoyable (yet stressful) experiences of my life so far, although I immediately ran into a few basic problems such as ‘where the heck am I going to work from?’ It was immediately obvious that the answer was going to be ‘my dining room.’

This presented a desking problem that was immediately solved with the introduction of a ramshackle old decorators trellis table, which was sufficient to the task, although had a rather startled look as though you’d just caught it in the act of falling down.

So back to Freegle…I opened the folder in my inbox and was just about to press delete when I noticed that the top message read “OFFER – Large antique solid mahogany desk – Oughtibridge S35”

One thing followed another, and thanks to the Freegler named Denise, who I shall be forever grateful to, I now have a splendid old writing desk that seems to make creating stuff a whole lot easier than it was.

Thankyou Freegle and Denise, you’ve made a fledgling illustrator/writer very happy.

(reposted from here 11th May 2010)