I’ve always loved drawing and making things and I think I spent my childhood covered in paint, spirographing or glued to Vision On.

I was therefore over the moon with the Wacom Graphire4 pen tablet Nicky got me for my birthday as I could never do my scratchy drawings justice with a relatively unresponsive mouse. The following illustrations are the first fruits of my efforts with an electronic pen.

The image on the left is an e-flyer for a forthcoming joint Manchester Digital and CIPR event on the PR opportunities of social media tools. I love the design of clunky old computers and this features an Atari Stacy ‘portable’ device from the late Eighties. Sadly they didn’t actually come in CIPR Red.

The image on the right is a proposed branding idea for the CIPR Northern Conference 2007. As the event’s being held in the North East it seemed only appropriate to use Antony Gormley’s iconic Angel Of The North.

My pen tablet is the Classic XL version and is about the size of a small laptop with an A5 active area which I’ve mapped to a portion of my screen for use with Adobe Photoshop.

Wacom seem to be pushing their products primarily as a digital photography editing tool but whatever people are using them for, the pen certainly gives a level of accuracy you could never dream of from a mouse. I’m still playing around with it at the moment but as those really annoying recycling adverts say, the possibilities are endless…

Last night we were in Manchester for the first in a series of events we're managing on behalf of the Chartered Institute of Public Relations North West Region in 2007.

The event took place at the city's stunning Urbis exhibition centre and aimed to encourage non-members working in PR to consider the benefits of CIPR membership. Regional Chair Sally Sykes provided the welcome to a capacity audience in the venue's B2B conference room and introduced presentations from two of the North West's leading broadcasters.

Our first speaker was Mark Edwardson, formerly co-presenter of BBC GMR's (now Radio Manchester) breakfast show before moving into his latest role as news reader on the regional TV news programme North West Tonight.

Mark clearly stressed that his presentation contained only personal opinions before exposing some of the best and worst PR approaches he'd received over his seventeen years in broadcast journalism. Most involved some of the better known institutions from our region and will therefore remain confidential however one news release received only this week opened 'I thought you might be interested to hear about a new treatment that is already transforming celebrities such as...'

The release then went on to proudly claim Big Brother public enemy number one Jade Goody as a customer! Now we shouldn't ever wish ill of anybody but Jade's fall from grace eviction was perhaps the best 50p I spent last week...

Mark was followed by John Pickford, Head of News and Sport for Key 103 and Magic 1152, who has worked as a journalist in the city for the past 30 years. Speaking from personal experience John is one of the most pleasant journos you'll ever meet.

John continued the entertainment with some unrepeatable spoonerisms the station had accidentally broadcast across the airwaves along with anecdotes from his illustrious career. Most notable was perhaps Key 103's 'shag bag' safer sex campaign which resulted in John being plastered across his local paper's front page for upsetting church goers by apparently encouraging promiscuity amongst the city's student population. Surely they're all too busy with their studying for that kind of thing...

It was certainly a popular event and a lot of fun to work on and we'll be repeating the format for the benefit of the Merseyside PR community in a few weeks time.

Finally, we must mention Urbis for the great venue it undoubtedly is. It's a fantastic and impressive building and ideally located for nearby car parks, Victoria railway station and the city's Metrolink tram system. Thanks must go out to Events Manager Liz and her colleagues for ensuring everything ran smoothly with the conference space and catering.

One thing I would mention to anyone considering using the B2B room is to be aware that their in built plasma screens run on a a widescreen format and that standard ratio Powerpoint presentations will therefore appear slightly compressed.