Notes on Creative Collaboration | Making Illustrated Poetry Together

Creative Bubbles by The Randoms has been up and running for more than a year now, which somehow feels both surprisingly long and incredibly short.

When we launched, our aim was simple, we wanted to build somewhere we could bring our poetry and artwork together as illustrated poetry and share it freely with the world. Since then, we’ve spent a great deal of time writing, drawing, redesigning, changing our minds, improving the website, trying new ideas and gradually shaping Creative Bubbles into something that feels right.

Somewhere along the way, we also found ourselves wanting to talk about the journey itself. We already share some of our longer thoughts on Substack, and we enjoy having that outlet. We’ve also realised that we want some of those conversations to live here, alongside the poems and artwork that prompted them. So, we’re starting this blog.

Topics We Will Explore

Poetry and art sit at the heart of Creative Bubbles, but around them are all sorts of ideas about creativity, ageing, identity, relationships, friendship, memory, loss, confidence, self doubt and the things people ponder when they give themselves enough time to think.

Some posts may begin with one of our poems. Others might grow from an artwork, one of our conversations, something we’ve read or a question that’s been niggling away at one of us.

We also want to write about creativity itself. Neither of us followed a neatly mapped route towards calling ourselves a writer or an artist. We’ve learned, experimented, abandoned things, started again, changed direction and occasionally surprised ourselves.

There’s plenty within that experience worth exploring, particularly for people who start creating later in life, returning to something they once loved, or making things without ever feeling entirely comfortable with the labels that tend to accompany creative work.

How We Work Together as Creatives

We don’t have a fixed formula for creating something new, although, for the moment at least, we tend to begin with a poem. Natasha is much more comfortable writing poetry. Rebecca has tried her hand at a couple of poems too, but finds writing them a struggle and feels far more at home with a paintbrush.

Once Natasha has progressed on a poem, Rebecca will often start thinking about how she might respond to it visually. Sometimes an image comes fairly quickly but othertimes it can take considerably more thought. We tends to review both parts of the work together.

It’s surprising how different a poem can feel depending on whether you read it in your head or aloud. When you’re reading silently, you can move through a line without thinking about where someone might need to pause, breathe or place emphasis. Reading aloud can reveal a rhythm that doesn’t quite work, whether thats a word that feels awkward or a line that needs a little more breathing space.

The illustrations go through their own versions of this process. We look at them together and, from time to time, ask trusted friends and family what they think. More often than not, we take something useful from what they tell us.

One of our favourite examples came in 2025 when Natasha wrote a beautiful poem called Love Collage. Rebecca had great fun taking inspiration from Natasha’s words and working some of the poem’s imagery into the illustration. We had strawberries, avocados, bubbles and plenty of flowers.

Then Natasha’s mum looked at it and asked a very simple question. ‘Where’s the butterfly?’ She was right. There wasn’t one. Rebecca went back to the illustration and added it, and when we look at the finished piece now, we both feel it’s stronger because somebody outside our little creative partnership spotted what we’d missed.

We bring different strengths to the same piece. We question each other’s choices, share ideas, sometimes change direction and listen to people whose judgement we trust. We work well together and always have done, as colleagues first and then friends.

Why Put These Thoughts Here

Over the past year, as well as our illustrated poetry, we’ve put a lot of work into our website. We wanted people to be able to explore our poems and artwork in different ways, follow the themes that interest them and spend as much or as little time with the collection as they choose. This blog gives us somewhere to share more of the thinking that happens around what we create.

More Than Finished Illustrated Poetry

Most people encounter creative work once its creator has decided it’s finished. They don’t usually see the half formed ideas, scribbled out lines, rejected sketches or the different versions that came before it. Alongside those visible traces of the creative process are the thoughts, questions, doubts and decisions that accompany almost everything we make. We’d like to share a little more of that with you.

There may also be posts about books, articles, exhibitions, places and people who make us think differently about life or creativity. We may return to older work and wonder whether, with hindsight, we might have taken it somewhere else. We might explore why certain ideas keep finding their way into our work, or what happens when something that seemed promising simply refuses to work.

There’s far more to the past year than we could ever fit into one post, from poems that changed completely along the way to illustrations we reworked, ideas we abandoned and things we’re still figuring out. We’ll come back to some of those stories here.

Come and Have a Read

If you already follow us through our website, Substack or social channels, thank you for being with us while Creative Bubbles has been taking shape.

If you’ve only just discovered us, welcome.

Have a wander through the poems, spend some time with the artwork and now, come and read our musings too. We don’t know exactly where this part of Creative Bubbles will take us yet.

Natasha & Rebecca

The Randoms

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