In Holly Thomas’ comics beauty and grief collide to confront “the weird mystery of death and dying”

Back in 2023, Holly Thomas decided to take a solo trip into Colombia’s Andean mountains. It was her first time travelling alone since her Dad passed away two years earlier, so she kept a diary, writing stream-of-consciousness entries about her emotions and experiences – “often really long sentences that bled into each other using loads and loads of ‘and’s”, the London-based illustrator tells It’s Nice That.

In the weeks following her trip, Holly began translating her words into drawings, creating a collection of acrylic, gouache and pencil comics titled Picking up a Toad. “When I look back on the project as a whole, I’m really struck by how moments of gratitude and joy sit right next to moments of grief, fear and darkness.” Those moments are most poignant in snippets of text, lifted from her diary and scrawled into the drawings. “It feels like the different types of feelings really amplified each other, resulting in an experience that was really rich and magical.”

The illustrations are full of life, drenched in vibrant pinks and greens, and framed by rocks with eyes, swirling trees and colourful butterflies. “It felt like a place that was absolutely teeming with life – constant insect noises, birdcall, beautiful plants and flowers,” she remembers. “I ended up using so much bright colour in the drawings – as a way to try and document the feeling of being surrounded by so much beauty.” The influence of magical realism is clear here; Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, is one of Holly’s favourite books, she says. “I really did feel surrounded by magic during my time in Colombia, and it helped me to process and think about the weird mystery of death and dying.” There is one drawing of Holly buried underground, surrounded by skulls and fossils. “Drawing and writing about things I feel really scared of helps me to be less scared,” she explains.

Holly often draws herself into her work, using art to “process, understand, and often find humour in the weirder and more difficult things that happen”. It’s something she’s done since she was a child: “I remember doing a really scratchy, angry, sad drawing when my goldfish Vanessa died,” she says. Reflecting on her trip to Colombia, Holly recognises how helpful it was to allow joy and sadness to coexist. “At times I’d felt like I was in this strange frozen place where I couldn’t really feel either properly,” she ends. “I still find grief hard to talk about, but making these comics helped me to put things into words that I hadn’t been able to express before.”