I’ve spent the last two days at Meadlands Primary School in Ham working with Nursery, Reception, Year One, Year Four and Year 6 on a big Olympics-themed frieze.

The younger classes began by mixing colours and creating printing blocks with foam sheets from the marvellous Work and Play scrap store in Tooting.

Next we cut out the printed waves and pebbles and stuck them on a huge blue roll of paper, also from the scrap store. These represent the swimming pool and running track. The collage also included bits of old maps and circles cut from catalogues with my badge-maker circle-cutter.

Next Y4 and Y6 looked at reference pictures of sports and created their own running and swimming printing blocks. We inked them up with rollers and printed them on the paper overlaying the background collage.

Finally we added some text in a flowing line using some old letterpress blocks lent to me by mosaic artist Sue Edkins. I also did a Q&A session in assembly about being an illustrator. Lots of budding illustrators at that school are already making their own comic books at home – wish I could have seen them.