In addition to their Voice Box and workshop activities, the Flying Donkeys are active in community-based events such as the Derby Literature Festival (hosting the highly successful Cylhwch And Olwen presentation in 2005) and in initiating storytelling-related art commissions. The comfortable and informal atmosphere that has been built up at Flying Donkeys over the past few years gave rise to a completely spontaneous response from local artists and art students. They brought along their sketch books, and drew the audience and guest performers and also captured images from the stories as they were told.
Drawing On Stories is Flying Donkeys' own success story. Supported by the Arts Council, England, FD initiated a series of important cross-art-form projects. The first of these, Twelve Sketches, telling the story of a night at Flying Donkeys was started by University of Derby student Zora Payne who took her degree in Illustration in the summer of 2005. It was her enthusiasm and dedication which both sparked off the ideas for the commission and made it possible. Now her sketches which are displayed at every event at the Voice Box are vibrant representation of what it feels like to be carried away in the imagination when listening to stories.