whatever floats your boat

Ta-da! I'm still not 100% happy with my (lack of) photographic skills, but without further ado, here are my new gocco creations - cards above and framed print below. I'm liking them a lot, so much so that I could have cried when Poppy broke into the room they were drying in last night and destroyed five of them :( Thank goodness my new registration technique worked so well, or that would have been practically every print!

Hopefully you can tell that those are boats (please!) but they are actually very specific boats/people. These are the sandboys, a group of men who work in Lagos, Nigeria. Every morning, they sail out in these boats (with sails made from old rice bags stitched together) and collect sand to be used in the building trade. They don't have any fancy equipment, just a bucket. They dive down to the seabed, scoop up a bucket of sand and put it in the bottom of their boat. Once the boats are all full of sand, they sail home again and sell it. You can see from the golden sand (yes, gold ink! eeep!) in the bottom of their boats that this is them on their way home after a hard day's work.

I learned about the sandboys when I was subtitling an episode of the BBC's Welcome To Lagos series many months ago, and as soon as I saw all the rice-bag sails, I thought the image would make a lovely gocco print. I had to use a fair amount of artistic licence, but I'm really happy with the results. Hooray! I already sent one card in the post this morning and am just about to write another three to people who are owed mail. Once I have some better pictures, I'll be listing the cards (provided I haven't used them all myself) and two sizes of prints in my shops at a very reasonable price! Watch this space if you want to nab one...