A new year, a new approach to blogging
Last year I tried a 52 week challenge, blogging weekly about what I’d been up to - it was hard! It turns out that illustrations of me binge-watching Supernatural are both uninteresting and hard to draw, leading me to quietly give up around week 18.
I realised that I blog to share my illustrations (contact me if you like what you see and you want one of your own!), to connect with people that I don’t see regularly (hello long distance friends and family) and hopefully to connect with new people.This year, I’m going to post monthly, around the last Wednesday of every month, sharing a bit more about myself and multiple illustrations and use my facebook page and instagram for smaller updates throughout the month. So, here we go…Now that Christmas is a distant memory, I can share one of the illustrations I did as a present for my friend to give to her niece.
This is the fifth name illustration I’ve done and it’s one of my favourites, just because of the cute toadstools! I love doing these name illustrations, I remember getting one from one of my mum’s friends when I was younger and it felt so special that it had my name on.I’ve been drawing quite a few little animal illustrations over the last few months, although I’m not entirely sure what to do with them! I drew one the other week, inspired by the Roald Dahl Esio Trot film on the tv over Christmas.
I hope you had the chance to see it (maybe it’s still on catch up?), it was such a lovely film! I watched it snuggled up on the sofa with the kittens (the boyf was at football) and it was one of those films that give you a warm happy feeling inside! I’m hoping that in true BBC fashion, they’ll have it on tv again next Christmas!Over the last few months I’ve been trying to create a selection of post cards based on the Norfolk Broads and I have been hit with the most unhelpful painters block (I’m sure that’s totally a thing) and aIl I’ve managed to do so far is a little illustration of the cutest door stop I’ve ever seen.
And as lovable as this little duck doorstop is, I’m not really sure what I can do with him (it’s wearing a bow tie thing, so obvs a boy) to make a postcard?! Every so often I sit down with my pencils and paints and try again to create something I can use for these postcards and more often than not, the page stays blank and I get extra wrinkles from frowning at the sketchbook.If anyone has any ideas on solving painters block or what I can do with my duck, please get in touch!As I’ve been focusing on Christmas requests, non-successful postcards and little animals in general, I seem to have drifted away from the girly illustrations that filled my first few sketchbooks when I got back into painting.
They haven’t disappeared completely, but they are definitely less frequent in my latest sketchbooks. Perhaps I’m going through a small animal phase? or perhaps I’ve run out of interesting girls to sketch?So this has been rather a long post, thank you if you made it this far! I promise they won’t always be quite so ramble-y once I get back into the swing of things!I would love to hear what you think on my illustrations, cures for painters block, and on the new monthly plan, so please get in touch on my facebook page (comments sections on the blog attract way too much spam!).To celebrate a new year and new blog approach, I’d like to leave you with my final illustration: party sheep.
x
ps. apologies if there are any typos, I’ve been dancing to the new Fall Out Boy album as I type :)