The archive · Content & Film · Product decision · 2023–2026
Holly Thomas's Picking up a Toad comics turn an Andes grief diary into saturated colour
After her father died, the London illustrator kept a raw diary on a solo Andes trip, then drew it as vivid comics where beauty and loss share every page.
Holly Thomas (London-based illustrator)
What it had to solve
Holly Thomas's father died in 2021, and she spent a period feeling frozen, unable to feel joy or sadness properly. In 2023 she took her first solo trip since the loss — into Colombia's Andean mountains — and kept a stream-of-consciousness diary of long sentences that bled into each other with "and" after "and". In the weeks after returning she began translating those words into drawings.
How it works
Picking up a Toad started as a diary. In 2023, two years after her father died, the London illustrator Holly Thomas took her first solo trip — into Colombia's Andean mountains — and wrote stream-of-consciousness entries about her emotions, often in long sentences that bled together with repeated "and"s. In the weeks after returning, she began turning those words into a collection of acrylic, gouache and pencil comics.
The work refuses the usual visual language of grief. The pages are saturated with pinks and greens and populated with rocks that have eyes, swirling trees and butterflies, documenting a place she felt was teeming with life — constant insect noise, birdcall, flowers. Lifted diary text is scrawled straight into the drawings, so gratitude and joy sit literally next to fear and darkness. One image shows Thomas buried underground among skulls and fossils: "Drawing and writing about things I feel really scared of helps me to be less scared."
The frame is magical realism — Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits is a favourite — which matched a trip where she felt surrounded by magic and, through it, able to think about "the weird mystery of death and dying". She has drawn herself into her work since childhood, using art to process and sometimes find humour in difficult things. It's Nice That featured the series with a gallery on 26 August 2026.
Why it lands
- Keeping the diary in the moment captured feelings she could not articulate later — raw, run-on sentences that the comics could quote verbatim.
- Choosing saturated, teeming-with-life colour as the grief palette made joy and sadness amplify each other instead of cancelling out.
- Drawing herself into the scenes — including buried underground with skulls — made the fear concrete and therefore drawable, defusing it.
- Publishing it as a named comic series (Picking up a Toad) gave the private process a shareable form that could reach readers beyond her own circle.
What it did
Drawing herself into the work let moments of gratitude and joy sit directly beside grief, fear and darkness, each amplifying the other. Thomas says making the comics helped her put into words what she had not been able to express before; the series reached a wider audience through an It's Nice That feature on 26 August 2026, with a full gallery of the work.
What you can take
When a feeling is too big to state directly, give it a body: drawing the frightening thing — even her own burial — turned unnameable grief into something she could hold, colour and share.
Since then
Thomas told It's Nice That she still finds grief hard to talk about, but that making the comics helped her put things into words she had not been able to express before. Reflecting on the trip, she recognised how helpful it was to allow joy and sadness to coexist after a period of feeling frozen between them. Picking up a Toad (copyright Holly Thomas, 2026) joined a practice she traces back to a scratchy drawing she made as a child when her goldfish Vanessa died.
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