Week 5 of my 5-week interrailing trip round Europe
And it’s the end. Can’t quite believe it, but also very happy to be headed home!
Monday
Final full day in Lisbon. Included doing some work (I’m glad I had a few bits of work to during the trip, as it helped show what a digital nomadic life could be like. I definitely felt more balanced when I could do two or three hours’ work and I think I would make sure, on future trips to have a project to work on, though ideally not one with a hard deadline, in case of WiFi problems and the like, so I could balance my days OK.) and riding on the iconic little yellow tram and being in a busy tourist area, and eating ice cream (in a tub, rather than a cone, because it melts too quickly in this heat) having a lovely cold beer on a very hot day. Oh, and of course, more tiles!
Tuesday
Tuesday was predominantly a travel day, with an early start – Lisbon to Entroncamento, Entroncamento to Badajoz and Badajoz to Puertollano. Lovely long train journeys, really, with beautiful views and lots of reading and dozing time. A close call in Entroncamento, when I got the platforms muddled and only just jumped on the train a couple of minutes before it left. Phew! And a conductor who felt I should have a reservation, but also didn’t kick me off or charge me, which was nice, obviously. (Railplanner app says no reservations needed; Badajoz guy at the station, when I was booking other reservations said they’re optional and it’s not busy on a Tuesday, so I didn’t get one, but it would have been free if I had, so probably should have!). Puertollano was a sleeping stop but I did manage to get out to eat some food in a nice little bar, where I would have loved to hang out and chat with friends/family, but didn’t feel like staying for another drink after finishing eating (especially as I only managed half my pizza).
Wednesday
My first mess-up of trains for this trip – I think it was pretty good to have got to Week 5 before making a mistake, to be honest. Got on the wrong train in Ciudad Real, which meant an extra 10 euros on another seat reservation and a split journey, rather than a leisurely four and a half hours from Ciudad Real to Barcelona. Not a big deal, really. I also managed to eat out at a very nice Lebanese restaurant that had loads of vegetarian options.
Thursday
Walked around Barcelona and also rode the metro a bit. Didn’t make it to anything famous, but enjoyed soaking everything up and spotting a bit of street art. Was pretty tired as well, though, and think my body and brain are definitely wanting to get home.
Friday
Very pleasant and comfortable TGV journey from Barcelona to Paris. No issues, no delays, no cancellations (though I believe other trains on the day may have been cancelled or shortened). Didn’t get to the hotel until about seven pm and, even though it wasn’t dark yet, I don’t like arriving places that late, especially places that are such a long way from the station. Staying in a not terribly cheap (I’m guessing because it’s the start of Easter holidays for like the whole of Europe) Ibis Budget on the outskirts of Montmartre. It’s comfortable and breakfast is included, but I’d prefer being a bit closer to ‘stuff’.
Saturday
Did some good Paris wandering, including Montmartre and Sacre-Coeur (one of my favourite spots in Paris to be honest) and then the Latin Quarter, including not going into Shakespeare and Co (queues!!), buying some things from a stall along the banks of the Seine, wandering along the Seine, a lovely lunch in a beautiful little café that, although in the middle of a popular area, didn’t feel touristy, and a leisurely wander to Place de la Bastille, before a metro ride back to the hotel and watching lots of TV on the laptop.
Sunday
Sunday morning was VERY COLD wandering and taking some pics of another famous French landmark (you know the one) and then meeting a friend for lunch a gallery and coffee and cake. Very pleasant afternoon. I made a point of not looking people up while I was travelling, even though my various illustration and pattern design networks mean I do know people (to some extent) in pretty much every city. I did think about it, but decided that I wanted this trip to be all about me exploring and doing my own thing and allowing myself to be entirely me and do entirely what I wanted and not being in social mode at all. But… I’ve explored Paris a lot over the years, and I was also getting a little bit tired of the pace and, actually, the just being me, so it was a bonus when Elise reached out to see if I could fit in meeting up. And I think maybe next time I take a trip like this (which probably wouldn’t be as long or full-on as this one, at least for a few years) I will reach out to contacts where I’m going, because there’s a whole other dimension to chatting to people who actually live in the place and seeing it from their viewpoint. I also, as I think I’ve mentioned already, would stay in places for longer periods, so would have time to do ‘me’, some work, some ‘normal’ touristy culture things and a bit of hanging with friends who live there.
General thoughts
I am typing this Monday morning, before leaving the hotel to walk to the metro to take me to Gare de Nord and the Eurostar to take me to London and then train from London to Stroud and HOME!!! I am really, really looking forward to being home and seeing everyone and getting hugs from those offering them. I am looking forward to being able to work at a proper desk with my giant screen and second screen. To sleeping in my own bed. To having people to talk to (though Chris and I have spoken pretty much every day). To having the garden to go and sit in. To hopefully having the stamina to fairly easily go for my daily walks out to Slad and back and possibly some longer ones along the canal sometimes (I’ve averaged around 12000 steps a day over the past month and have had some days that were close to 30000 steps). To cooking. To seeing my sister and going to the circus. To seeing friends. To spending time with a cat sat on my lap. To getting back to routines and normal life (though it’s the school holidays so routines won’t quite be normal for a couple of weeks). To drawing and painting more (it’s so strange that I haven’t done loads of that while travelling; I really thought I would, but I think perhaps it will all feed into my work somehow).
I think one of the things about travel is that it can remind you what you love about home. And what home means to you. I have loved exploring and loved seeing the different paces of life in different cities and countries. I have loved speaking (even for only brief moments) the languages that I have and attempting those that I’m not brilliant at or don’t speak (really only Amsterdam where that was an issue). I have loved seeing street art and decorative and architectural art of various kinds throughout my travels. I have loved making a point of just exploring and not trying to tick off landmarks and famous things.
I have found that I prefer staying in AirBnB whole flats, even if they are only teeny studio flats, where I can cook and sit on a sofa and at a desk or dinging table, and can wash my clothes. But that these need to be, usually, for longer stays and hotels for the one-night stops en route. I know that I will stay for longer periods in future – at least 3 full days, I would say, and more if a place is well situated for day trips out on local trains. (But make sure to eat out at a local restaurant at least once and stop for a coffee or beer, to ensure that I am putting money into the local economy, because there are obviously ethical issues with this style of accommodation.) I didn’t explore any small towns or villages and would really love to do that in the future.
I think I probably need to suck it up and get a Kindle (or similar) for future trips because it was hard when I ran out of books and had to rely on the small selections on the English-language shelves of local bookshops. And books are heavy! Or maybe come up with other ways to have a good book supply.
I would just take (Simple) soap and not shower gel in order to pack the whole tub of my co-wash. I ran out just over half way though and my hair is really annoyed about it and is probably going to take five weeks to recover and get back to its normality.
Clothingwise, I think I got it mostly right, but I think I would pack a better dress, rather than tunic one I did. And I would make sure to have dress and skirt that could be layered with shirts and jumpers, etc. and perhaps not bother with jeans, as I’m more a dress and skirt person. I was fine with just my walking trainers, though they were a bit hot when it was hitting 28 degrees Celsius in Spain. But I don’t think I’d pack sandals unless I was specifically only going somewhere very warm.
I managed well with the backpack and I had two tote bags for when I needed to carry extra. On train journeys I usually had snacks and drinks in one of the tote bags and on one journey, all the books went in a tote bag because it was hot weather an I had to pack more clothes into the backpack.
I kind of regret not making a decision to pick up a postcard or a fridge magnet (or something like that) in each city, though actually that would have cost quite a bit.
I wish I’d managed at least one stay in a hostel, to experience the different atmosphere. But the private rooms (and I really can’t stay in a dorm for a multitude of reasons) usually cost more than a cheap hotel, so I never did. I will look more closely at this next time and try to make sure to fit at least one hostel stay in.
I would do my utmost to arrive places by around 4pm at the latest, because both times when I arrived around seven I got a bit panicked and worried (especially in Lisbon when it was dark at that point – before the clocks went back and Portugal is an hour earlier the rest of Western Europe). Unless the hotel was VERY close to the station.
But all in all, it was an amazing experience and a very fitting fiftieth birthday present to myself (I am not fifty until October, but this was the best period to fit it in). I have been to some places I really wanted to visit. I have done a lot of train travel. I have seen a variety of countryside and geography. I have been to six countries (and through another three – Belgium, Austria and Monaco – on the train). I have taken tonnes of photos that I will look through and digest and sort later. I think it will be interesting to see what sorts of things caught my eye the most.
I am very happy and lucky to have been able to do this. And I would highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking it sounds good. Happy to answer any questions anyone might have (of course I only have my particular experience to go by, but I am sure there is some useful advice and information I could impart).
Thanks to those of you have followed along in whatever capacity. I’ve enjoyed knowing people were enjoying hearing and seeing about my trip.
See the route and lots of pictures on Find Penguins
A reminder that you can see the whole trip on Find Penguins – you can see a map of where I went and ‘footprints’ with lots of photos and some words and ponderings (some longer than others). You can scroll through the footprints either oldest or newest first (so, now it’s at an end you might want to look through ‘oldest first’ so you can see how the whole trip went. Or you can just look through ‘photos’ only (but then you miss out on my go-with-the-flow, in-the-moment thoughts about that day).
Week 4 of my 5-week interrailing trip round Europe
Wow! Only one week left.
Monday
This was my extra day in Valencia, and it was nice to have it, because I got to wander round a less crazy Valencia and just enjoy pottering without stopping at a Falla every couple of hundred feet! It was a fairly laid-back day and just had a hotel picnic, rather than going out for a meal. The bed in that hotel was not very comfortable (or it might have been more about having a crazily sore shoulder, but I think the two made each other worse). But it was a nice place and I liked being close to the sea.
Tuesday
I made sure to get to the station early so that I could make a reservation for the Madrid to Badajoz trip on Wednesday. But then, the train was delayed by a whole hour, so there was a fair bit of sitting around waiting. The trip itself was fairly quick – just under two and a half hours. Got the metro to near my hotel and checked in. Room was fine, although there was a drip in the bathroom that was a bit annoying. It was a nice area with a lively, young and vibrant feeling. I had a beer and some olives and then went to dinner. There was a vegan restaurant quite close, so I went there. I over-ordered so left about half of the food, which felt a bit bad about. Actually, realised that I ordered something that I thought was a starter, but it was from the section of things to share. So not surprising, really. Sorted out where I’d be staying the next day. I had been hoping for a five-day stay in Lisbon, with maybe some daytrips out to a couple of places, but couldn’t find anything in my budget. So ended up booking three nights in Badajoz
Wednesday to Saturday
Nice train journey to Badajoz, and I sorted out the rest of the trip, booking TGV, AirBnBs and hotels and filling in my rail planner.
Lovely AirBnB in a great location. Quite a way from the station, but actually not that far when you don’t listen to Google Maps (probably 20 minutes walk), but right in the middle of the old town. I spent a pleasant few days, wandering around and seeing loads and loads of street art, and also visiting a couple of (FREE!) art galleries, as well as the Alcazaba. Cooked all my own food. And did a bit of work and just had a nice and relaxing time. Oh, this place had a REALLY comfortable bed.
Weekend (and into next week)
And Saturday was crossing the border into Portugal and moving to UK time, because Portugal runs an hour behind its neighbours. (But only briefly, because the clocks went forward on Sunday, so I was back to the time I was used to, but will then jump forward on Tuesday when I go back to Spain. The train journey was fine, but VERY hot. The train between Badajoz and Entroncamento is a tiny little green train. The size of a bus and a half, I’d say. But it wasn’t remotely full. It stopped at LOADS of stations, and did get busier as we got closer to Lisbon.
Arriving in Lisbon was a bit overwhelming. I think the first time I’ve fully felt that all of this trip, in fact. It was quite late (only six but almost dark – see above re. time difference). I had (as I have all through this trip) looked up how to get to the AirBnB by public transport and there was a bus that would go almost door to door, so that’s the one I was going to get. First of all I wandered round trying to work out where to get the transport tickets and finally went and gone one from a counter. Then I couldn’t find where the bus picked up from. The station was surrounded by bus stops and there was a big bus station right next to it. I asked multiple people and they all told me different things and pointed to me to this stop and that stop. But none of them had the number of the bus on them. I stood at the stop where Google Maps thought I should for about three buses worth of time and it never appeared (but lots of others did – a number of which would have got me VERY close to my AirBnB it turned out, but I was not in the frame of mind to dig down and think straight). In the end I got a taxi. It’s quite a long way from the station. The bus I was trying to get would have taken 40 minutes. So, I got some extra cash out from a machine, just in case. And then sat in this taxi, watching myself move through the city on the screen of my phone (I always have this fear that taxi drivers are going to rip me off – I don’t think any ever have, so not sure where that comes from). It was perfectly reasonable price and I still have the extra money I took out and the driver seemed very happy when I told him to keep the change (literally only a few Euros). And then I managed to negotiate the lock box and the stairs and got into the nicest AirBnB (and the AirBnBs are nicer than hotels because they’re bigger and have more you can do) I’ve had the whole trip. Two bedrooms, living room, reading nook, kitchen with very good washer dryer, lovely shower (actually the water pressure sucks, but you can’t have everything) and a balcony. Wandered quickly down to a shop round the corner to grab some supplies and cooked some dinner. And put a wash on of pretty much all my clothes (except for the warmer clothes that have barely been touched since Germany).
Sunday I started the day with some work and then went for a wander and took lots and lots of photos of tiles. So many tiles. And a wander round a museum. Picked up some more supplies. Had lunch and then a siesta that lasted a bit longer than I’d anticipated (note to self, maybe set an alarm if you’re having a siesta?). Then I walked up to the station from where I will need to get the train on Tuesday very early morning, to make sure I know where it is. Can’t miss the train from Lisbon. Tuesday is already going to be the longest travel day yet (over twelve hours, if you include getting to Lisbon Oriente station from the AirBnB). And picked up a couple more supplies. I want to make sure I have enough liquids and snacks for the train journeys on Tuesday, because a lot (or possibly all) of them will be on trains that don’t have buffets and I don’t want to be stuck on a very hot train again without enough liquid. Cooked a meal and danced around to some music (that’s something I realised I have barely done while away, though have listened to music on the train journeys, but not the dancing around to loud music while cooking that I do at home). Did a bit of homework and read a bit then typed this up. And, since I had such a long siesta, I’m going to do a bit of work before bed.
Next week (the last one!!) will be another full day in Lisbon (going to get me on a tram and explore a bit further afield, I think) and then back to Spain and then France at the end of the week.
General thoughts
Still enjoying myself, but definitely looking forward to going home and being with my family. I do really like having solo time, but I think this trip has probably stretched it a little bit far! And getting back to routines and normality and looking forward to spending the next few weeks digesting and processing the trip and hopefully outputting some art of some kind that draws on it all!
Follow me on Find Penguins
A reminder that you can follow along with my trip on Find Penguins – you can see a map of where I’ve been so far and see ‘footprints’ with lots of photos and some words and ponderings (some longer than others). If you’re into it, you can sign up yourself and share your own trips and also get notifications whenever I post a new footprint (that may be a bit excessive if you’re not a member of my family).
Week 3 of my 5-week interrailing trip round Europe
A week of train strike games, strange struggles to cross borders, unexpected new places, and going ‘home’ (or to somewhere that was home four decades ago).
Monday
Monday was my ‘extra’ day in Nice. Very glad I took it and in an AirBnB, so I could properly unwind and reset. I finished the work early in the morning and was able to go out and wander and then get some more vegetables to cook myself food. I had another wander in the early evening and then settled in for an evening with a book and a bit of TV and some drawing.
I felt very comfortable in Nice and I am certain it is somewhere I will return to for a longer stay.
Tuesday
Tuesday was a train day with trains from Nice to Marseille (2.5 hours), Marseilles to Avignon (1.5 hour) and Avignon to Nîmes (40 minutes). Nîmes was not on the original plan. Originally, I thought I would spend two nights in Nice and two nights in Montpellier and then head off on the lovely coast-hugging journey to Port-Bou and the border with Spain. But the train strikes in France were now rolling strikes, which meant you had to check at around 5pm each day, what trains were running the next day. And adjust your plans accordingly. Nîmes felt like a good choice as it got me a bit closer to the border and looked like a nice place.
I booked a hotel (Ibis Budget) very near the train station (facing it, in fact – though it still took me going out the wrong exit of the train station and then walking all the way round the block before I found the very obvious entrance to the hotel!) so that I could make an early (6.05am!) train in the morning. It wasn’t too far from the historic centre, either, so I had a nice wander in the late afternoon. Sat and had a beer and watched the world. Ate a chocolate crepe while wandering the winding little streets. Sat for a while in a big square area that had lots of benches and was nice for people watching, and chatted to Chris.
And then nipped into a supermarket close to the hotel to get some bits so I could have a hotel picnic – bread, cheese, tomato and a big bottle of Orangina. And got a reasonably early night to be ready for the early start.
Wednesday
In checking the train information the day before, I had jumped to an incorrect conclusion (mostly because I was looking at two sources, rather than just relying on the local TER PDF). I thought that the train would be going all the way to PortBou, but just not calling at the stops after Narbonne. However, it was just fully stopping in Narbonne. At 8 am in the morning. After what really didn’t feel like enough sleep.
I sat in the station for a while going through my TER information with a fine-tooth comb and also trying to see if there were any relevant TGVs that could get me somewhere from where I could then get across the border. I also looked at Flixbus and even Blabacar. There were some bus replacements running from Perpignan later that day, if I could get to Perpignan. But all the Blabacar lifts that were coming up would require me to get to the outskirts of town, and I didn’t feel up to that. I couldn’t find anything that looked like it would work.
So then I made a punt that the next day’s trains would be an alternate of this day’s – i.e. they would be similar to the day before’s and therefore would get me from Narbonne to Portbou (kind of – none of them were actually going all the way to Portbou, but to the French border town of Cerbère). And I then needed somewhere to sleep, and ideally somewhere that would let me check in early. I looked at a few hotels, but then thought I would try AirBnB. I found someone who did not have anyone staying the night before (according to their booking calendar on AirBnB, anyway) and sent the a message asking if they would be OK with an early check-in and why. They thankfully responded positively and I made my way to their little studio.
I dumped my stuff and then had a wander around Narbonne, which turned out to be quite pretty, with a canal and winding streets. I bought a baguette filled with mozzarella and tomato and pesto and only ate about a third of it. I took it back to the studio and put it in the fridge for later and then had a good long nap! Woke up in time to check the next day’s trains and my punt had worked and I could get to Cerbère the next day, and thence, it seemed to Barcelona. Phew.
I went to the grocery across the road to stock up on snacks and then, on a whim, decided to go get some pudding from the boulangerie/patisserie across the (other) street – where they had a three for the price of two deal on. Bonus! I ate two of my treats for pudding (had the rest of the baguette for my ‘main’) and saved the other to have for breakfast in the morning. And it was time to set my alarm for very early again!
Thursday
Thursday was about lots of changes. And rail-replacement buses. There were two buses to get, one from Narbonne to Perpignan (somewhere I’d always wanted to go, but didn’t really get to take any of it in and only had 20 minutes milling around outside the station), then Perpignan to Cerbère Mairie (aka, the bus can’t actually get to the station itself so drops you off outside the Mairie). They actually turned out to be the exact same bus. If I’d thought to ask I could have been sat on the bus during that 20-minute wait. But as it was I instead got chatting to a lovely Dutch couple who had been having all the struggles with the train strikes. They were three days behind their plan, having got the train from Amsterdam to Paris where they expected to pick up the fast TGV to Barcleona, but no. They had a number of days of creeping down through France on TERs and bus replacements and late night check-ins at hotels and were rather fed up with the whole thing. Though both smiling a lot despite this. They also weren’t very sympathetic towards the strikers, having had their retirement age raised for quite a while and a fair bit higher than the French plan, and themselves having been perfectly happy waiting for 67.
The bus journey was beautiful. I know the train journey is also supposed to be beautiful and I’m sure it is, but I think we saw more than we would have on the train, as we were winding our way up and round mountains (where I imagine there will have been some tunnels). When we got to Cerbère, we had to find the train station. The bus driver pointed ‘that way’ and then with no clear signage we asked a lady, who said ‘Oh no, the trains aren’t running, you have to get buses from the Mairie.’ But when said that we were looking to get a Spanish train she told us how to get there. Which involved walking through a really long tunnel and climbing A LOT of steps. The lady at the ticket office was a bit confused as she said Spanish trains didn’t usually pick anyone up here. But there were other people waiting so it looked promising. (And I had found it both on the RENFE app and on the rail planner, so I felt it had to exist.) We had a moment of panic when we looked at how much grass was growing along the rail track, surely indicating that it’s an unused track. But lo-and-behold a train appeared through the tunnel and it was a Spanish one. Hooray! We were excited. And thank you RENFE for helping poor travellers like us to cross the border. (Another interrailer had done this a few days before and this train hadn’t been available, so she got a taxi across the border. So my new Dutch friends and I planned to do the same if this somehow didn’t work.) The train journey was four minutes through the tunnel to PortBou on the Spanish side of the border. And from there I had a regional train planned, which looked like it was running as planned.
The Dutch couple ended up catching the same train. I was settling down in a four-seater when they called me over to ask if I wanted to sit with them. I really should have gone with my introversion default and said I was fine there, but I didn’t, and joined them. Perhaps because it felt quite nice to have some conversation, after a while of not. But I ended up sitting in a really weird way, with crossed legs on the seat and my back facing the aisle, so I could look out the window and not get my feet in the way of anyone else’s feet, and also so I wasn’t constantly in eye contact reach. I am certain that this is responsible for the really sore shoulderblade area that I have had ever since. But it was nice to have a bit of a chat. They decided to skip Barcelona (their plans had been to have a couple of nights there and a couple of nights in Valencia, before moving on to stay with some friends in Spain, but they only had one night left before they were supposed to get to their friends, so decided to go straight to Valencia so they could have a bit of glimpse of Fallas).
I had somewhere booked in Barcelona though, and walked down to the hotel (which was booked through AirBnB – weirdly) and enjoyed walking down, though the bags were starting to feel burdensome as my shoulder felt a bit sore. I was too early to check-in which I knew, but I also knew that the hotel had lockers to keep your bags in. They also had a lovely rest room with comfy chairs and free cold water and free wifi where you could sit and wait for your check-in, which I felt was a nice touch, but I wanted to wander, so I dropped my backpack and snack bag off and went wandering round the local area. I liked it. It was not an overly touristy area and I enjoyed observing people going about their everyday life. And enjoyed the juxtaposition of older, traditional buildings with very modern ones. I sat at a café and had a cold beer and a tortilla (not an actual bocadillo, but still good).Even though I hadn’t been to Barcelona, the Spanishness made it feel familiar to me and in particular the heat felt like Spanish heat (it had a different feel to the same temperature in Italy and France; I think it’s perhaps down to the humidity, but might also be down to how the buildings work with the heat). And then wandered back to the hotel. I ended up not going out in the evening and just eating a bit of the snacks I had and sleeping quite early. My start the next day was really late compared to the last couple of days, but I was exhausted from all the 1-day stops and early starts (NOTE: 1-night stops are not ideal when interrailing!).
Friday
Lovely train journey on the regional train from Barcelona to Valencia. It was five and a half hours (and actually took six), but it was perfectly comfortable and pleasant. I really do enjoy long journeys like that. I don’t mind some changes, but a long direct train is very pleasant indeed, especially when it’s taking you through some new countryside to observe. The train started very busy (but only so busy that there were a few people standing – not UK kind of busy!) and I did think everyone was going to Valencia and I’d be stuck on the right-hand side the whole time again. But I managed to swap over to the left about halfway through and got to see some glimpses of sea.
I arrived in Valencia still not sure whether to walk to my hotel or get public transport. I walked out of the station into fairly large crowds and I hadn’t seen anywhere to buy tickets (note, there are ticket machines at all the metro stations and most tram stops, so I would have been fine), so I decided to at least start walking. It was a long walk. Google Maps said it would take an hour and seven minutes. It took me two hours! But I did stop quite a lot and even took a few little detours to take pictures of fallas I saw. And I was soaking up a whole tonne of sense memories – especially from the little fireworks kids throw all the time. I even got to see a parade of falleras and falleros – would have missed that if I’d got the metro.
My hotel is by the beach. I have no real recollection of Valencia having a beach, and certainly didn’t regularly go hang out there. I wonder if it was harder to get to then and perhaps it was even not fully part of Valencia? Certainly the walkways and cycle paths and wheelchair paths that are built alongside the beach look to be quite modern. The hotel is fine. Fairly basic, but fine. No kettle, though. (Note, next time I will buy one of those cool little fold-up mini kettles, and take a travel mug of some kind, so I can hot drinks all the time!) I checked in and got settled and then went and had dinner in one of the many restaurants along the seafront. I had vegetable paella and then a kind of bread and butter pudding made out of brioche. Had a beer with the paella and a glass of cava with the pudding. Very nice.
Saturday
Saturday I walked almost 30,000 steps. I wandered out in the general direction of the street I used to live, stopping and meandering off to look at any Falla I saw, and also grabbing some churros and chocolate sauce (I have never had any chocolate sauce with churros that tasted right to me, though plenty that have been nice in their own way. This was right. Or otherwise how I remember it from my childhood.) Taking pictures of arty things that struck my and interesting buildings and so on, as well.
I found my street. And found that it was incredibly busy. Because it had won the top prize and loads of people were going to see it. I couldn’t get a full shot of my building (only go the bottom of our windows, as we were on the top floor) because it was so busy, but it was still nice to see and to see how it had changed. I walked around the neighbourhood a little more and then wandered along to the river bed to experience the amazing park that’s there now. Sat for a half hour to chill and have a chat with Chris. And then I wandered in toward the centre. Moving around Fallas and winding streets and dodging crowds. There were points where there were huge crowds watching parades of falleras and falleros, for example.
At some point I decided to head back to the hotel, catching a few fallas, but mostly walking along a very long straight road that went alongside the university (modern-looking campus that I’m fairly certain wasn’t there when we were, but who knows). My shoulder was getting worse and worse and I did a bunch of stretching exercises as I walked and carried my cross-body bag in my hands as I think it was aggravating it. Ate at one of the restaurants again and that wasn’t anywhere near as nice as the other one. I had a vegetable pizza, but it seemed they didn’t pre-cook the vegetables in any way, so they had no real flavour to them and the dough was a bit weird. Plus it was busy and I just felt kind of awkward, whereas I’d felt comfortable and happy in the other one. I had an ice cream after too, but didn’t enjoy it much as it was melting too quickly (I thought that wouldn’t happen at night!) and I was probably too full from the pizza, so threw half of it away. And then I went to bed and to sleep and couldn’t for the life of me manage to get up and go watch fireworks at one in the morning!
Sunday
This was a much more leisurely day and I got a day ticket on the metro/trams so I didn’t have to walk as much (though still clocked up over 16,000!). I headed out to Joaquin Sorolla station, where I’ll need to go from to get to Madrid, so that I could get a reservation on a fast train for Monday. (Getting to Madrid from Valencia on little regional trains is not really doable, unless you want to break it up over a couple of days, which I didn’t.) Unfortunately (though also unsurprisingly) all the trains were fully booked, apart from either a really early one or a really late one, neither of which I was prepared to do. So instead I got a reservation for one on Tuesday and extended my stay at the hotel another night (for the non-Fallas price!).
I wandered a bit up near that station and then did a bit of hopping on and off the metro and wandering around near different stops.
But then made my way back to the hotel to make sure I had a siesta. So that I could get out and see at least one Crema (burning of the Fallas). I did not want to get up when I woke, and my body really would have preferred to stay in bed, but I forced myself to get up and out. I decided that I would see if I could watch the crema of the Falla of my old street. Which was possibly a silly decision in some ways as it’s quite a popular one and also because it turned out it burnt half an hour later than the rest of them (apart from the city square one that burns at 11pm). I also got there far too soon (actually caught a glimpse of the burning of the children’s falla, which happens at 8pm) and I was expecting to be able to sit down somewhere to get some food, but that didn’t seem to be happening. What I should have done was have dinner by the beach again and then wandered down. But never mind. I did get some churros an bueñoles (may have spelt that wrong – little deep-fried battered blobs of pumpkin!) and a can of Pepsi.
I walked round the block a few times, sat down outside a café, thinking I’d get a beer, but stood up again 10 minutes later when no-one had come to ask me if I wanted anything (I know I could have grabbed her attention myself, or gone inside and got something, but I didn’t). And then I stood and waited for 10 pm and then looked it up and found out that it would actually be 10.30 pm. So many times I came close to giving up and going back to the hotel, but I stuck it out. I was happy to have. There was a firework display before they set it fire, so it was OK that I missed the big fireworks the night before, and then they set it alight and it was burnt pretty quickly (actually, I didn’t stay to see it completely burn as I wanted to make sure to get on the metro and it not be too crowded). I’m very glad I made it and that it was that one I watched. I think we watched from our balcony 40 years ago, but not positive.
I was grateful that metro and trams run 24-hours during fallas (though feel sorry for the drivers missing out on the festivities) and got back to the hotel by about 11.30, I think. Chatted with Chris, then uploaded everything to Find Penguins and then finally went to sleep. The bed is not helping with my shoulder pain – it’s tending to be very bad when I wake up.
General thoughts
While the train strikes are frustrating (I do support and respect the right to withdraw labour), I have enjoyed some of the unexpected places or experiences it has brought me – new towns, bus journeys winding through beautiful mountains and chance encounters and pleasant conversations with new people. Having the pass, and the fact that I’m tending not to book anything too far in advance or anything that can’t be cancelled, means it’s fairly easy to change plans. (The one I’m worrying about at the moment is the getting home leg – I have looked up planes, though, and there are some fall backs if necessary. I am going to keep an eye on whether or not the rolling strike is continuing this week and work out whether to try for short hops up through France, or what.)
It’s been really lovely visiting Valencia again and especially finally getting to see Fallas for the second time in my life. Such an amazing and crazy festival. I love it. It’s been a bit sad thinking that Brian and Jenny didn’t get to experience it again, too. I know they really loved it the first time.
I definitely find it easier when I have longer stays, so if I … WHEN I do this again I will not get a continuous pass, but an X days in X time pass and I will go for 3- or 4-day stays in most places (except for the occasional one-night stop near a station purely to break up a long leg). And I’ll probably default to AirBnB style apartments rather than hotels, so I can cook for myself a lot more. An occasional fancy meal out is nice, but having to navigate restaurant menus as a vegetarian (who would really like to be a vegan) makes it harder and also I can feed myself for a lot less money usually and ensure I get a good variety of nutrients, etc.
Follow me on Find Penguins
A reminder that you can follow along with my trip on Find Penguins – you can see a map of where I’ve been so far and see ‘footprints’ with lots of photos and some words and ponderings (some longer than others). If you’re into it, you can sign up yourself and share your own trips and also get notifications whenever I post a new footprint (that may be a bit excessive if you’re not a member of my family).
Week 2 of my 5-week interrailing trip round Europe
Some of this was written on my phone on trains while travelling. Some of it was written on Sunday night, with my laptop lying to me and saying it was only just gone 8pm, when actually it was 9pm. Here. Obviously. It was 8pm in the UK, and in (some parts of??) Portugal (huh, who knew?). I haven’t adjusted tenses and so on to compensate. Mostly because I’m too tired, but also because it perhaps adds authenticity and a feeling of being there, too. (Or it’s just confusing, in which case sorry, but, like I said… too tired!)
Monday
Up VERY early to get the 7.30 train from Munich to Bologna. Note to self: only need just over an hour, even if you’re not at all packed.
Long train journey on an EC train. Not as comfortable as the ICE train was, but still fine and I had an actual view through the window, which was particularly useful for seeing all the mountains we were travelling through. The scale was mad. They seemed really close but then you could see there was a whole big town of teeny looking houses in front and realised they were quite far away.
As always (how am I already saying ‘always after a just a week of doing this?), I was fascinated in the changes along the route of house types. We actually went through Austria for some of the journey and I could imagine Heidi in lots of the houses.
The temperature also climbed as we travelled further south, from below zero in Munich in the morning to, I think, 16°C by the time we got to Bologna.
I switched trains in Bologna, to a Regionale (they don’t need reservations but are still valid with interrail pass). It’s a double-decker. How exciting for someone from the UK where we definitely (right?) don’t have double-decker trains.
Reached Ferrara and had a long walk (actually not hugely long, but felt longer with a backpack and dressed for further north) to the hotel. It’s a beautiful little hotel, though definitely not modern. Fortunately they have one socket that takes the general European type plugs (my research assured me that you rarely find the old-fashioned ones in Italy any more). The room smells a bit damp, but I will accustom to that, I imagine. The heating is on! What? It’s too warm for heating. I have a shower and then go out in search of food.
I went out far too early for food. Should have had a siesta and then gone out. I walk round and round and round. Oh my goodness, Ferrara is so beautiful. Just my kind of place. Loads of old buildings, small windy streets. I saw at least ten bookshops – maybe Ferrara is the Hay on Wye of Italy? I love it. But could I find anywhere to get dinner? No. I could have had multiple Aperol Spritzes, or teeny tiny shots of strong coffee. But no food. This may be one of the times when not being solo would have been useful. I probably would have happily sat down for a drink and a chat if I were with someone else and passed the time until dinner was being served. But I was too tired and I can’t chat to myself and it’s too dark to read a book. So I went and grabbed some stuff from a Co-op (called Co-op, I’m not using it generically) and then went to McDonald’s, which apparently hasn’t moved with the times as much as German McDonald’s, because there were no veggie options. So I had fries and a mixed salad (which was actually really nice and my body will have appreciated the vitamins, I’m sure).
Back to the hotel, where I had a quick chat with Chris and then dozed off before setting everything up to charge and going to sleep properly.
Tuesday
I slept really well. Only woke once to go to the loo (that’s the way I measure these things). Woke naturally at 6.40 and looked at stuff on the internet for a bit before grabbing a shower (the water pressure isn’t brilliant, but still refreshing) and getting dressed. Got stuff ready for a day at the fair, including getting my portfolio loaded up on the iPad just in case someone asks, though am mostly going to soak up and be inspired. Had breakfast (which is included at this hotel – I never pay extra for breakfast as I’m not usually able to eat much that early) – a croissant and a cappuccino – which was lovely, and read my book while eating. There were multiple nationalities in the breakfast room, which I love. French, Japanese, American and English (me). I love being surrounded by people talking in loads of different languages – though I must say the Americans drowned everyone else out quite well.
Then time to walk back to the station and head to Bologna. Walked on the other side of the road this time to get a different perspective. Lots of bikes her too. And I noticed how a lot of the women are riding the bikes with amazing posture – completely straight upright backs like there’s no effort at all (though, it’s really flat so maybe it actually is no effort). But of a wait at the station and then onto the Regionale (this train goes between Venice and Ferrara – I think Ferrara would make a brilliant base for exploring – Bologna, Venice, Verona and Florence all quite close by). The train has USB chargers so I give my phone a boost without running down the brick and type this.
A packed bus from Bologna station took me out to the book fair. (I’ve written a separate post about the book fair, as not everyone will be interested in that – given lots of friends and family will be reading the posts about my trip and they’re not necessarily interested in thoughts about an illustration-heavy book fair, like my illustration friends and colleagues probably are.)
After wandering the book fair for a few hours, I headed back into the centre of Bologna to wander (love it – little streets, old beautiful buildings, lots of terracotta colours, parades everywhere to shelter pedestrians from sun or rain) and to look for some lunch. I wandered quite a bit and in the end just decided to sit at one of the tables in the streets (I did check that there was something I could eat on the menu first).
I’d been really looking forward to eating Italian food in actual Italy for the first time in a while (actually, in just over three years, as Rome was my very last trip overseas, a srprs.me on with my youngest daughter, who was only 10 then); prior to that it was 1995! Sadly, it did not meet (or come close to meeting, if I’m honest) expectations. In the middle of a very touristy area, I suppose that’s not a huge surprise. I had vegetable tortelloni and caponata with baked cheese. The tortelloni was not freshly made, and it was very undercooked (NOT just al dente – but about a third of it was still dry). The caponata on the other hand was so overcooked you could barely distinguish the vegetables in it and the cheese wasn’t hot enough so not really melty. But worst of all, I felt strongly that I could taste chicken stock and so I couldn’t finish it because all I could think of was that it was cooked in chicken stock (it may well not have been, but once I start thinking it, I can’t unthink it). [If you don’t know this about me already, I am a third generation vegetarian; never willingly eaten meat. I also try intermittently to become a vegan and currently finding it a lot easier not to try until I go home, when I may well be ready to COMMIT!]
After that, I wandered a little more but then decided to head back to Ferrara. I got a bus, then got off it a couple of stops away, having realised it was going in the wrong direction (in my defence there was building work going on in the street I got the bus and the bus stop I should have been able to get it from was not functioning). Got on the correct bus and went to the train station and thence back to Ferrara. Long walk back to the hotel and a fairly early night.
Wednesday
Wednesday was spent in Ferrara. There was a train (and other public transport) strike in Italy. It’s quite possible I could have got places but I decided exploring Ferrara would be perfect. And it was indeed very enjoyable.
I browsed bookshops (there are LOADS of bookshops in Ferrara – including a bookshop full of Catholic masses and with a nun greeting you as you come through the door and a very academic bookshop that seemed to be full of people’s theses, but also plenty of ‘normal’ bookshops). I didn’t buy anything. I only found one shelf of English-language (and French and German, actually) books but nothing jumped out and wanted to be read by me. Plus I still had books to read.
I sat in a café drinking cappuccino and aranciata (fizzy orange) and reading my book and then I went and had a gelato (my first ice cream of the trip). Then I wandered out to look at the river, which wasn’t hugely impressive. And managed to completely miss seeing the old city walls (I walked alongside the river a while, having seen what looked like a big park on the map, hoping to find an entrance and have a bit of a nature bath, but it was very hot and I gave up and turned back. When I looked later, I realised if I’d walk a bit further I would have got into it and been able to see the walls. Ah well, that’s something to do on another visit.)
I had some snacks for lunch and a slice of (not very nice – threw half of it away) pizza and a bit of a siesta. And then I went out for dinner! I looked stuff up and found a place literally around the corner which sounded nice, so I walked round there, opened the door and asked if they had a table for one. They were very nice and welcoming (and didn’t sit me by the loo – apparently lots of solo women diners get plonked next to the loo or at the bar, but thankfully neither of these has happened to me). I had a full four courses, and a 0,5 litre carafe of (fizzy) white wine and a litre bottle of fizzy water. It was Delicious. Truly. And I can now say I have eaten proper Italian food (not vegan, but vegetarian – I can’t speak for the cheese, actually, but I have usually not worried too much about that for some reason).
Thursday
Thursday was Venice! About an hour and a half on the train, so not too difficult. Loved the morning, when I wandered out toward the edges and through lots and lots of quiet, peaceful little streets and over bridges and canals. Sat down on a bench and soaked it all up. Loved loved loved the lack of cars. And there weren’t any bicycles either, which was pleasant – Ferrara has a lot bikes and I felt like I was going to be run over by one every couple of minutes!
The afternoon wandering was a lot busier, as I ended up in more central areas and walking in throngs of people down some of the streets and across some of the bridges. I still enjoyed seeing what I saw, but the crowds were a bit much for me. I ended up grabbing a pizza and a cold beer down a street near the station as I had a long wait for the next train (though it turned out a longer wait ever, because there had been an accident and all the trains in and out of Venice had been delayed). The pizza was actually lovely, and so was the beer. They were just exactly what I needed at the moment, including the chance to sit down and read for a bit. On the train, I ended up chatting to an American (I think) couple who live in Switzerland but were on a little break and staying in a spa hotel in a spa town (can’t remember the name) and doing little day trips in the mornings and then enjoying the spa in the afternoon. They were very nice. Back to the hotel and then yet another quite early night. All this walking is exhausting!
Friday
A moving on day.
Ferrara to Bologna. Wait about 50 minutes.
Bologna to Parma. Wait about 50 minutes.
Parma to La Spezia.
This was to be a short stop. Just one night. Because I couldn’t quite make it all the way to Nice in one day, from Ferrara. But also because La Spezia was on my list of places I’d like to see. I got there early enough to be able to take a wander before it got dark. And it was lovely. Nice big old buildings. And the sea!!! I my goodness. I just stood there and breathed it in and with it came such a feeling of calm and peace. I love the sea. And there were a lot of lovely plants too – loads of cactuses and succulents and palm trees.
Oh, and I sat in a café near the sea and had an Aperol Spritz. Because I kept seeing everyone drinking them (there seems to be a rule that you drink one or two of these in Italy at around 5 or 6 o’clock) and they look so pretty. But I hadn’t had one because I know I don’t like them. I decided I would try one anyway, because maybe I do like them now. Tastes change after all. Nope. Still don’t like them. I like sweet flavourings in my fizzy wine – Aperol is so very not sweet. Ah well, I did it. And now I know.
I did eat dinner in La Spezia and it was fine. Nothing amazing and probably paid more than I should for it, but it was what I needed at the time (spaghetti ala pomodoro and tiramisu and a glass of white sparkling wine) and then another of those early night things. I seem to have a lot of them on this trip!
I was quite wheezy in the night for an hour or so. Realised, with hindsight (and talking to Chris) that it was being by the sea. The same thing happened to me my first couple of days in St Ives, and then I acclimatised. It’s very unpleasant though. But I slept better once that had dissipated.
Saturday
And moving on again…
La Spezia to Genoa.
Genoa to Ventimiglia.
Ventimiglia to Nice.
All three trips alongside the sea but with a lot of time in tunnels, too. Pleasant. Genoa to Ventimiglia train was a quite old one and had dirty windows (not that you couldn’t see through, but that you couldn’t take good pictures through!) and was a bit uncomfortable by the end of the two and a bit hours.
Arrived in Nice and spent most of the walk from the station to the AirBnB in digital conversation with the AirBnB host who was explaining how to get the keys and exactly where the flat was both on the street and within the building. Thanks to her excellent descriptions, I found it fine, but barely took any photos while walking.
I will be in Nice until early Tuesday morning. I decided stay a day longer than planned and get a home-like place, rather than hotel room, for various reasons, including needing to use a washing machine, having some work to do and wanting to really wind down and feel a bit settled briefly.
The trip so far has been amazing and nothing awful has happened. But it has been quite fast paced and I’ve done a lot of walking and a lot of taking in new sights. And a lot of discombobulation, albeit on a fairly minor level since Europe as a whole (especially western Europe) is very familiar to me. I love the train days, and I love the walking round discovering a new place days. But I needed a mostly sitting and being day or two.
After dropping my things off at the studio, I took a quick wander and found a Spar, where I bought VEGETABLES, and pasta, and passata, and tomato and vegetable puree, and haricot beans, and cheese, and milk, and beer. And I came back and cooked myself a meal. Nothing fancy or complicated, but reasonably healthy. And just what I needed. And I put a load of washing on. Bliss.
Sunday
I had a lie in until gone 9am! Though that may be because I spent all night blowing my nose. Woked feeling full of cold (though there’s a good chance it’s hayfever not a cold – and yes I am taking my antihistamines and brought enough with me to last the whole trip). Put the sofa bed away, showered, ate some cold pasta (of course, I made enough for four meals!) and then sat at the table with my laptop and did some work.
Took a break around 1.30 pm to wander down to the sea (there’s sea here, too!) and sat in the lovely long park they have here, live sketching (something I almost never do, but thought I would somehow miraculously be doing the second I got off the Eurostar, but it was fun, so hopefully I’ll find more time and inspiration to do so again) and chatting to a beggar about learning languages and architecture and how annoying it is that everyone pays for everything with cards these days (I must get some cash out and turn it into little coins so that I can actually give out some money). He was very nice, anyway.
And that reminds me about the beggar in Venice who pointed me in the correct direction (to the railway) after I’d walked past him (and sadly ignored him) three times. I stopped and chatted to him and gave him some money (the last of my coins, in fact) and apologised for walking past him three times. It’s difficult in busy tourist areas, because there are a lot of people asking for small change. I have found myself switching off and not seeing them, which is not who I want to be. I’m not sure where to go from that thought, though. Make sure I have lots of small coins in my pocket? Somehow fix the political system in every country I come across so no-one needs to sleep or beg on the streets? Or keep turning away? Will have to see. [Side note: Don’t remember seeing any beggars or obviously homeless people in Amsterdam. Are they doing something right? And, if so, why aren’t other countries, including ours?]
Back to the studio for more pasta and more work. Then more pasta and more work. It turned out to not be quite as small an amount of work as I thought, but I think I should be done with it by tomorrow lunchtime and I’m enjoying getting my brain working in a different way, so should still get some nice Nice exploration done (see what I did there?) Now I need to put this up on my blog and then get the sofa bed out and get a not so early night. And hope that I wake completely snot-free, and ready for Week 3.
Follow me on Find Penguins
A reminder that you can follow along with my trip on Find Penguins – you can see a map of where I’ve been so far and see ‘footprints’ with lots of photos and some words and ponderings (some longer than others). If you’re into it, you can sign up yourself and share your own trips and also get notifications whenever I post a new footprint (that may be a bit excessive if you’re not a member of my family).
Ponderings after attending the Bologna Children’s Book Fair
In case you’ve come directly here from a Google search or link or something, you should know that I was only really popping into the Bologna Children’s Book Fair for a few hours, rather than full-on attending it (another time, for sure), because I’m (at the time of writing, of course) in the middle of a 5-week interrailing adventure around (some of) western Europe.
Random ponderings and notes
I overheard an illustrator managing to pitch to an art director on the bus! I can’t imagine having the nerve to that. Then again, a few years ago I hadn’t imagined being able to email art directors with my work and now it’s pretty much a built-in habit.
The fair itself felt quite overwhelming, as book fairs tend to for me (been to my fair share over the decades – in fact, I met my husband at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which I always think sounds cool!). Illustration, unsurprisingly, has a really big place at this one, though, whereas I think that’s definitely less so at London and Frankfurt and Paris (unless I’m not looking in the right places).
The illustration wall (s – there were a bunch of them) was immense. So much amazing art on there and such a wide variety of styles. There were also many displays up of illustrations that had won various prizes (I can’t keep track of all the different prizes) or in specific sections.
I couldn’t work out, in the moment, whether to feel very inspired or completely daunted by the huge amount of truly stunning illustration and the number of illustrators there looking to get work. With hindsight I am choosing inspiration, because that is the more positive and constructive one (not from any logic).
I went and said hi to someone I’m working with currently, which was nice. And, as my husband reminded me when I chatted to him later that day, I was one of the illustrators with work on display and being pitched at Bologna, which is pretty cool.
I took quite a few photos of the names of publishers that ‘called out to me’. I’m hoping they were calling out because they felt like somewhere my style would fit, and not just because I loved the work. Though surely it could, or even should, be both?
I did not go with the plan to pitch at all. I think my portfolio currently is still probably skewed toward illustration for adults, rather than children, and I would want to have more children-focused pieces in there if I did. I did load up my portfolio on the iPad, just in case, but it didn’t come up and I definitely didn’t go stand in any portfolio review queues, though I really love how many there were around and I would totally plan to do so if I were to (WHEN I) go ‘properly’ (aka not while in the early stages of a 5-week interrailing trip round Europe!).
I did sit and listen to a couple of talks. One by the art directors from the Folio Society (actually quite fortuitous to come across that, as they are adult-focused rather than children- and they run a very good, and free-to-enter competition). That was interesting. Another was by an illustrator (Loes Riphagen) about her process on a book, which was great (love to find our more about others’ processes).
The atmosphere was buzzing for sure. I think, if I go next year or the year after, I would:
- book accommodation early and in Bologna.
- aim to book AirBnB (or similar) so I could cook and wind down well
- maybe consider sharing a flat for the week with one or two other Illustrators, so we could go round together a bit
- put together a children-focused portfolio that really shows characterisation, scenes, movement, versatility (and probably some other things!)
- get some postcards printed (or maybe something more exciting than postcards?)
- have something ready to go up on the illustrators’ wall
- go to portfolio review open calls
- buy some books (couldn’t do that this time, as have a 30-litre backpack to take me through the five weeks).
I would love to hear others’ experiences of the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, either this year or in previous (or future) years. If you’ve written a post about your experience, drop a link in the comments! And let me know if you’re planning to go next year.
Week 1 of my 5-week interrailing trip round Europe
End of first week – Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich
Monday
Train to London – fine (nice to get an early one without paying a small fortune)
Waiting a lot at St Pancras as vey early (better early than late). Bought a book and some snacks.
Eurostar to Amsterdam. Absolutely fine. Fell asleep and completely missed going into the tunnel.
Arrived Amsterdam and got out of the gate with my QR code (apparently Netherlands is the only place that works, though!)
Exited the station the wrong side and ended up walking all the way around and ending up in front of the station. But that’s fine as got to see the water and North Amsterdam on the other side.
Walked up, using Google maps, to the hotel. Lots of canals. Busy streets. LOTS of bicycles – watch out for them, they ignore red lights. Got some cash out. Found hotel. VERY steep steps to reception. Thankfully room on the same floor as reception. Nice woman behind reception. Room is TINY and a bit worn around the edges, but fine. Got some food (vegan burger at Flower Burger – yummy). Went to sleep.
Tuesday
Had breakfast at hotel. Could only face a croissant and coffee, and probably shouldn’t have, but it was included. Wandered round Amsterdam all of Tuesday morning and into afternoon. Was wet (actually snowing at first). Beautiful. Love the canals so much. Love the plants outside people’s buildings. Love the bikes parked up against walls and along the canals. Walked down to museum district and ate some chips and mayonnaise. Outside. Very cold. A pigeon was eyeing up my chips but lost out. Didn’t go in any museum, because they all charged over 20 euros and none of them jumped out enough to make me want to pay that. Went in a museum bookshop and window shopped lots of lovely art books. Bought some bits and bobs from a supermarket. Went back to the hotel and had a nap. Wandered into town in search of food and ended up having chips and mayonnaise again. Nice enough, but really filling! Wandered back to the hotel and went to sleep. May have watched some TV. Don’t remember. Talked to Chris, but can’t remember if it was in the evening or in the day.
Wednesday
Train to Berlin. Nice train. Didn’t get a reservation. Quite busy. Got moved about half an hour into the journey. But then the seat I found was fine (confirmed by conductor). Nice and comfortable. Got a tea from the buffet and proud to have spoken German with no problem to the guy working the buffet.
Arrived Berlin. Easily got the S-Bahn to Charlottenburg. Very pleased to find out I could use interrail pass for S-Bahn journeys. Never got asked to show my ticket, but apparently they are super strict if you get caught without a valid ticket.
Lovely hotel room. Big room. Comfortable bed (two of them, though I only used one!). Great shower. Ate at a very basic Italian across the street from the hotel and had a pizza and a beer. Nice enough. Cash only. Thankfully I had some cash on me!
Thursday
Started by wandering down through Charlottenburg. I wanted to find some jazz bars in case I felt up to going to one in the evening. Took photos of nice buildings. Got the S-bahn at Zoologischer Gardens and went down to the east to see the Eastside Gallery (part of the Berlin wall that is covered in loads of artists’ murals). Then wandered further looking for a free art museum place. I found it, but couldn’t work out what was going on inside. Saw a photography exhibition of different sides of Istanbul which was interesting. Wandered further until I got an S-bahn station (can’t remember which one) and got on, planning to go back to the hotel but took a spur of the moment jump off at Hackescher Market which was nice – little artisan market and there was a nice looking Italian restaurant there so I had a very late lunch/early dinner – HUGE mixed salad and then spaghetti pomodoro. And a beer. Then went back to the hotel and hung out for the rest of the evening, with a couple of cans of gin and tonic and finished watching S2 of Harlem.
Friday
I had looked up different areas of Berlin and had some ideas of places to look around. I wandered down to Tiergarten and then decided to walk all the way through the park, which was lovely. I forget how much I can miss nature when I’m on a city break, and given I’m pretty much on a five-week city break I need to fold in some nature time, for sure. Ended up in an area with lots of huge buildings which was quite interesting. Went back to the hotel and had a nap. Ended up just grabbing McDonalds and bringing it back to the room in the evening. I felt a bit like a second day was overkill, although I totally could have explored more and gone to a few more of the places on the list I had.
Saturday
Train to Munich. I was originally going to get the 9.30 train but realised that it would probably be busy on a Saturday so looked up to see if I could get a reservation and couldn’t get one until the 11.30 train, so switched things round in the pass and paid for the reservation, which I’m glad I did, as the train was very busy. The journey was fine, except I had a window seat that had no window. I read lots and enjoyed the journey and only dozed a bit. Arrived Munich after 5. Found the hotel, and was a bit concerned it seemed like a rough area, but I think it was purely that it was a really busy time of day. Beautiful hotel room with lovely wallpaper and comfortable bed. Went out looking for food and a wander. Happy wandering around the (very busy) old town and catching glimpses of beautiful buildings. Found a restaurant (Italian. Again.) and was very glad that they seated me despite it just being me, as it was busy and they sat me at a table of for three and at no time tried to hurry me out. Lovely food – spinach ravioli followed by tiramisu (which I don’t normally like, but this was delicious). And this time I had a glass of Prosecco instead of a beer. Found my way back to the hotel without having to check Google maps at all. Was very proud of that.
Sunday
Lovely day. Wandered lots in Munich, starting in the old town and took loads of pictures. Then wandered down to the river and walked alongside it for a while until I got to the Bavarian National Museum. On a Sunday it only costs one euro, so I spent maybe an hour and a half wandering in there. I didn’t take any photos as I wasn’t sure if you were allowed to. But saw some stunning tapestries, extraordinary statues in a variety of media. What struck me most about the statues was the exquisite detail on hair, and in particular beards. Also quite a bit of porcelain and crockery and ornate furniture. Lovely. I don’t think I saw it all. Was a bit of a maze. But I was starting to get too hot and didn’t have my water with me as you had to leave your bags and coats due to security risks. After that I found my way back to the old town, where I had a haloumi sandwich and sat and ate it very messily. Then wandered back to the hotel, stopping for a mocha in Starbucks as I was really really cold. Then I had my requisite nap. I wonder if I am taking on my mum’s old habit of needing a siesta every day. Then had a long chat with Chris, and ate some crisps and jaffa cakes while watching Mrs Maisel and drawing nothing much at all on the iPad. (I have definitely not become a travel sketcher – yet, at least. Nor have I become a travel novelist. Mostly I am just a traveller, and that’s actually probably enough!) Now typing this out, which ideally would go on the blog, but then I’d need a picture for it, and I don’t have time to draw a picture. Maybe I’ll put it on the blog anyway and retrospectively add a picture. And now I realise I need to do a Duolingo lesson and then get to bed, because I have a 7.30 train to Bologna in the morning. Finally I will be able to eat Italian food in actual Italy!
General thoughts
Have had lots of lovely phone calls with Chris, hearing about what’s happening back home and telling him about what I’ve been doing here. We think we missed talking on Wednesday. I do like having that touchstone to home.
I haven’t felt lonely (though maybe I would if I didn’t have those calls). I like the time in hotel rooms reading and watching and drawing (have not been doing huge amounts of drawing, though – would like to do more).
I’ve been tending to eat one meal a day and then have other snacks around that. I’m not getting overly hungry and that seems to be working out fine so far. The next hotel (four nights in Ferrara) includes breakfast, so will see if I can bring myself to have some, so as to save some money.
It feels like two nights is my optimum, apart from the two specific events I’m booked for (Bologna Book Fair next week and then Fallas in Valencia a bit further on). Though that might just be because I wasn’t as taken with Berlin as the other two places so far. I don’t feel like I’d want another day in Munich though, even though I really enjoyed today’s wanderings. We’ll see.
Hotels have been fine so far. This one’s the prettiest, Amsterdam was the one with the most character and Berlin the most comfortable. So far.
Trains have been fabulous so far.
Some potential issues coming up with the French strikes. Will not know for sure until Tuesday evening/Wednesday morning whether or how they will affect me, but I have found some ferries to Spain, should I not be able to get through France. Fingers crossed it will be fine though, because I REALLY want to see Nice and speak a language I can speak REALLY well.
Follow me on Find Penguins
You can follow along with my trip on Find Penguins – you can see a map of where I’ve been so far and see ‘footprints’ with lots of photos and some words and ponderings (some longer than others). If you’re into it, you can sign up yourself and share your own trips and also get notifications whenever I post a new footprint (that may be a bit excessive if you’re not a member of my family).
One week to go
This time next week I’ll be in London on my way to St Pancras station, where I’ll be catching the Eurostar to Amsterdam.
I have two nights booked in Amsterdam and then two nights booked in Paris at the end (Eurostar home from Paris). I have two chunks of time booked in the middle, for specific events (Ferrara for four nights to coincide with the Bologna Children’s Book Fair) and Valencia for three nights to coincide with the end of Fallas – which I haven’t experienced in four decades!).
Other than that I will be deciding as I go. Currently, I’m thinking [Amsterdam], Berlin, Munich, maybe Verona, [Ferrara], Florence, La Spezia, Genoa, Nice, Montpelier, Barcelona, [Valencia], Seville, (bus to) Faro, Lisbon, Porto, Bordeaux, [Paris]. But… I am prepared to cut out some of the stops and stay longer in places if I’m finding it tiring. Also might consider heading straight south and leaving Germany for another trip, if it’s too cold. And, I’m also willing to do shorter stops places, and spend more time on trains, because I really do love train travel (ask me again in 6 weeks and I may have a different opinion, of course). I will also need to be prepared for things like train strikes (these happen in Europe, too), maintenance work on lines and so on.
I have a global two month pass, so I can be flexible. I am planning to mostly take the smaller, slower trains that require no reservation, though I will take at least a couple of the fast ones just to experience proper modern train travel (because we haven’t really got that in the UK – most of western Europe has been building super fast train lines and modern trains over the past few decades; we haven’t).
Packing
I have a couple of things to pick up today and few clothes that are in the washing machine. So from tomorrow, I intend to be fully packed (or as close to it as I can get – my iPad won’t go in the bag until the last minute!) and I will also do a walk carrying my bags to ensure they’re manageable.
I am trying to pack as light as I can. Which is a definite challenge. I’ve got a lot better with clothes over the years, from taking away a different dress for every single day to just a handful of basic outfits. And, I will be washing as I go – 5 weeks of underwear would take up a backpack of its own! I will have a couple of vests, a pair of cycling shorts, one dress, one skirt, one shirt, jeans and a t-shirt, plus undies. If I get fed up wearing the same clothes all the time, I’ll discard/donate (depending on whether they’re donatable) and buy something new.
My biggest challenge in packing light is art supplies and books (including sketch- and notebooks). I have compressed down my art supplies into a much smaller pencil case and varying colours across supplies (so I have Posca pens in a couple of colours, Caran D’ache Necolor in a couple of other colours, pencils in a couple of other colours, etc. I also bought some ink cartridges and will just have a black fountain pen. And a blackwing pencil. ONE paperback sketchbook. When I fill it, I will post it home and buy another. I am going to buy a notebook when I get there, because I love European exercise books (really hoping that the Dutch have similar ones to French, Spanish and Italian, now), for journaling. And I will take two fiction paperbacks. And when I finish one I will leave it for someone else to enjoy – e.g. at hotels or hostels, etc. – and buy a new one (whenever I’ve travelled in Europe there have always been plenty of English-language books in bookshops, plus when I’m in France and Spain I can pick up something in French or Spanish).
I bought a tiny, really cheap, and not very powerful laptop to take with me. My Surface Book is really heavy and its battery has pretty much given up staying charged for more than half an hour. I am not planning to do publishing work while away, but do want to be able to write and also this way I can do a bit of work if I need to or feel the urge. I will be doing illustration work while away – the iPad is fully portable and that’s what I do pretty much everything on. I’m considering getting Affinity Designer on the iPad so I can put together patterns on the iPad too, as I’ve not been able to do that well on the iPad and still default to desktop Illustrator, which I don’t think the crappy laptop can handle.
Eeek
So now really all that’s left is to work through the nerves about going away for such a long time. I know it will be an amazing experience for me (also know that there will be frustrations along the way and it won’t be constantly amazing) and I am really glad I’m doing it, but it’s also a bit daunting to be away from my family for longer than I have ever been away from them. I’m fairly sure that a week is the longest any of us have been apart. Of course, they’ll all be fine, there are no worries about that, but it will be weird not to be there in person with them for so long.
Planning a big European train adventure
I will be turning fifty next year. Half a century. And, because I fully intend to live until I’m a hundred1, I am treating this as the half-way marker on my journey through life. As such, it requires a big celebration of some kind.
For almost the last decade I have assumed that the big celebration for my fiftieth, would be a really big party. Maybe a shared party with one of my friends who are also turning fifty next year. But as it grew closer, I realised that I don’t actually want a big party. I’ll almost certainly have a few smaller celebrations with close friend groups and close family. But a big party where I’d need to mix multiple separate friend groups and different branches of family? Where I would get to spend at most ten minutes with each group, and still less with the most special people? Nah. That sounds more like my idea of hell (well, hell would probably also include a bunch of people I really really can’t stand, but purgatory at least).
What I wanted, I realised, was something big and memorable that would be something to look back on with joy and gratitude, but that could also be a starting point for what I want a lot of in the next few decades. And what jumped out at me was travel. I started really diving into travel in 2019 and the start of 2020, then this big global thing happened to stop it. And I haven’t left the country (the UK that is – I have made it to both Scotland and Wales) since. What I was doing then was a LOT OF flying (after more than a decade of no flying at all and as someone who doesn’t drive, so I didn’t feel TOO guilty about it), but the pandemic made me rethink that a bit – not just for the benefit of the environment, though that is definitely a big factor, but also in terms of slowing the heck down. I had already decided that my next trips would be by train, rather than super-quick, super-fast (though, actually, when you’re going to Europe, not that fast when you have to sit and wait in the airport for hours and queue for hours in passport lines) short-haul flights. I would save flying for the further afield trips.
So I decided that my big celebratory thing that I will do some time between this October (my 49th birthday) and next October (the big FIVE OH) will be to buy an interrail pass and run off for a month. The kids are (or will both be by then) teenagers and, while they MIGHT miss me a bit, they’re not going to be detrimentally affected by my absence. To be honest, they probably wouldn’t have been if I’d done it five years ago, or even ten, but it would have been unfair to Chris to leave him to hold the fort entirely on his own when they still needed walking to and from school and multiple activities and supervising constantly at home (and I’m pretty sure I would have been seriously miffed if he wanted to take off for a whole month back then!). Mostly these days, though, all we need to do is make sure the house has plenty of food in and their bank accounts and school/college lunch accounts are stocked and they sort themselves out the rest of the time. Family dinners still happen, though not every evening like they used to, and we do hang out and chat a bit, but a lot of the time they are off doing their own thing, in their rooms, or out with friends. What’s App, Skype, etc. mean we’ll still be in touch plenty and I frequently settle sibling disputes via What’s App rather than in person now, so could probably still do so from across the Channel, if it were needed. Though I would be leaving in the very capable hands of their other parent, and happily return the favour another time.
Planning a solo interrailing trip
I haven’t decided when exactly I’ll be taking this trip, other than some time between October 2022 and October 2023. I do know I probably want to be home for my actual fiftieth, so it would definitely be before then. I also know I don’t want to go during the school holidays, as I’d like to be available to do stuff with the kids then, and also because it’s likely to be busier in the holidays, especially the summer holidays. (I’m also quite into the idea of doing a shorter version with the rest of the family, or any of them who want to come along, at some point. Maybe I can wangle what I did with my travel in 2019/2020 and have a separate trip with each member of the family! That way I get to have multiple trips. Though that does sound a TAD selfish, plus excessive, and a little bit expensive! We’ll see.)
I’m also still very much in the research stages and need to decide what I want out of the trip and what sort of travelling I want to do. I am fairly certain that I don’t want this to be a super speedy rush around the whole of Europe spending a single night in all the big cities. I want to go slowly. Maybe taking a handful of the super-quick trains, but then using the small regional trains (that mostly don’t need extra seat reservations and other fees) and maybe even deciding to hop off a train in a town that looks interesting and seeing if I can find somewhere to stay there, rather than booking everything in advance.
I had thought I’d mostly go with AirBnB style accommodation, booking flats where I can cook for myself, but have since thought that I will probably go with rooms in (fairly cheap) hotels. I don’t need to eat at a restaurant every day, but can pick up snacks from street stalls or picnic food and then maybe have a restaurant lunch one day and dinner another day. I also don’t have to have three courses every meal, so it doesn’t have to be a super expensive thing to feed myself. Since it’s just me, I don’t have to worry about my snoring waking people up or having enough space for everyone to have privacy (which is why we’ve taken to booking AirBnB style accommodation when we go places together, rather than cramped hotel rooms).
So… I definitely can’t cover the whole of Europe in a month, if I’m slow travelling. I will need to decide where to narrow down my trip. Whether to concentrate on two or three countries very close together, or make one or two of those fast trains I include take me from one side of Europe to the other, or from North to South and have two or three separate chunks for the trip. I’m currently leaning toward concentrating on France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, and leaving the rest of Europe for another trip. But … I may well change my mind. What I’m definitely getting from all my research is the certainty that this won’t be the last trip of this kind, but rather the first of many.
I’m reading a lot of blog posts and articles about European train travel, solo travel, and solo travel particularly as an older woman. I have bought a copy of Europe by Rail [affiliate link], which is amazingly useful and an enjoyable read. And, of course, looking at The Man in Seat 61 a lot!
I think I’ll probably write a few posts about the planning and research (for example, to work or not to work, what to pack and what sort of bag(s) to take, how many books to take, how not to buy stuff while I’m travelling (I do have a tendency to come home with a lot of extra books, art supplies and pretty bits and bobs, which would obviously be difficult to carry on such a long trip) and there’s a fairly decent chance I’ll write some while I’m actually travelling, too. Hopefully, I’ll also get into travel illustration of some kind during the trip, which I’ve been awfully rubbish at so far (see below for some of the few pictures I’ve drawn while traveling), but I’m making no promises on that. Definitely will depend on whether I am taking work of any kind with me.
I’m hoping some of you will enjoy reading about this trip (before, during and after!). I know I love reading about this kind of thing myself, anyway, so I’m sure I can’t be the only one.
1 Yeah, I’m definitely going to need to step up my getting healthy and fit efforts to have a chance of achieving that. But I do think a positive attitude has a significant effect, too.
What makes your heart sing?
Have you worked out what makes your heart sing yet? I actually think this is something that is probably continually evolving for most of us. It’s certainly changed throughout my life, but even changes a bit from day to day or different times of the day.
I think people who find this out early on and stick with the same thing through multiple decades are probably quite rare. (No empirical evidence of this, though; it’s purely based on my own ponderings, experience and chats with friends, so would love to know whether others agree!)
Some things have always called to me, though, and never stopped. Books and drawing of some kind or another are probably my forever things. I’d also probably say languages and travel, but I don’t think they’ve fully stuck throughout my life.
Most of my life, my career has been in books (though encompassing digital publishing of various kinds as time went on) and I love that my more recent illustration career has overlapped with the publishing world, because I don’t think I would ever want to leave books behind completely (though, obviously, I’m never going to stop reading them).
(SIDE NOTE to any art directors in the book publishing world – I think I’m about ready for another chunky book illustration project, so give me a shout if my style fits your requirements.)
Anyway, there’s a little Sunday introspection for you. I’d love to hear what you think. Do you have some forever things that have always called out to you? Do your passions change with the seasons or the decades? Have you been able to find a career in some aspect of what makes your heart sing?
PS You may have noticed there are three versions of this hand-drawn type piece. I’m making a point, now and then (not for EVERY illustration, as that could be a bit time-consuming), of rejigging an illustration into different formats, or planning out different formats from the start. I think this is something that’s quite useful for commercial illustration – for example, different formats for social media, a thumbnail format and a full-page format. So, if you’re commissioning me and this sounds helpful, do ask about getting an illustration in different formats.
Working from home
Working from home? Is it like Marmite (that may be a UK-centric question)? Love it or hate it?
I have worked from home (apart from a six-month stint in-house nine years ago) since 1999. And, unsurprisingly, I love it.
I love that I don’t have to worry about the weather, spend hours on a bus or train, wear makeup, straighten my hair (obviously I shouldn’t have to do either of those two, but… yeah!) …
I love that I get way, way more work done than I ever did in-house, because I’m not constantly being interrupted by people talking to me (I know, lots of people love that. I don’t.) and my days aren’t filled with meetings (though, the pandemic has meant there a lot more of them, but at least they can be done via Teams now and not require a whole day away from my desk to get to sit talking in a conference room for a couple of hours – though I do miss the excuse to bunk off for the rest of the day and wander round the V&A or my old stomping ground of Oxford).
I love that I can go to my kids’ summer concerts, art exhibitions, shows, etc. without having to book off half a day. I love that I can start at 5am and finish at lunchtime, or work a couple of hours in the morning and some more after the kids are in bed. (Even though, for the most part, I stick to 8–4 and enjoy hanging out with them before and after school.) I love that I can take my laptop and/or iPad away with me, so I can do a bit of work while also having a change of scenery and explore.
I love that I can take my lunch in the garden, watch a film in the middle of the day (I literally never do that, but I love that I can), hang the washing out when I need a break from my desk…
Oh, and I very rarely find myself wandering off to the fridge for cheese.
So do you love it or hate it? Do you want to be able to work remotely as much as possible, or would you rather be in the office all the time? Enjoying a mix of both?
I’m a little intrigued by the possibility of becoming a remote employee, or a hybrid employee. But I think I still probably need to be my own boss. I am very grateful, though, that there seems to now be much more opportunity for those of us who do love working from home.
Lifestyle illustrator: Hand-drawn type and drawing words
I have always loved decorative type – from delicate, swirling calligraphy, through neon bubble writing, spray-painted graffiti and colourful mixed-up fonts, to ornate chalkboard writing. And, my absolute favourite …
I absolutely love the loose, handwriting-style that I can get from a dip-pen or fountain pen – or, more often, my Apple pencil! I like mixing up lower-case and capitals, and throwing in some font-like letters here and there. (I do have to switch off the editor in me, because she can get a bit antsy when I go all out with mixing up lower- and upper-case.)
Hand-drawn type (mostly) on its own
I use hand-drawn type a lot. I use it on its own for positive, life-affirming messages …
… or shouty activism (yeah, I need to do a lot more of this one!) …
… or celebratory words …
Hand-drawn text within illustrations
I use it within illustrations a fair bit. On bottles and packaging or wall art …
… in the words for my alphabet series …
… as captions on individual spots …
… as text in speech or thought bubbles, or not …
… in illustrated recipes …
Hand-drawn type within patterns
I even use it in patterns sometimes!
Hand-drawn type on book covers
Oh, and of course for book covers.
Do you love
too?
What’s your favourite decorative type, illustrated words, hand-drawn text (…)? Leave a comment and tell us what you love about illustrative text. Or link to some of your own hand-drawn type, if you like!
If you’re looking to commission some hand-drawn type, do get in touch!
NEWS: List Happy by Vanessa King, illustrated by Tasha Goddard
Exciting news! At the end of last year and the start of this year, I was very busy creating lots of illustrations for this lovely book List Happy, which is written by Vanessa King and illustrated by Tasha Goddard (that’s me!).
While I’ve had illustrations in books before, this is the first with my name on the front cover, so it’s especially exciting for me. The book will be published, by DK on 28 June 2022, in the UK and the US.
And here’s the cover – and, yes, that’s a tonne of my hand-drawn type.
The blurb
Improve your mental health by finding joy, gratitude and happiness in everyday things.
We have so many good things in our lives and yet much of the time we fail to notice them. But taking the time to think about the small, everyday things that bring us joy and make us thankful can have a huge impact on our mental wellbeing. What better way to boost your mood than to spend time listing all the good things around you? Where are the places that you feel most at peace? What music brings you joy? Who are the people who have made a positive difference in your life? What challenges have you overcome and helped grow your resilience?
In this beautifully illustrated book, over 75 lists guide you on the path to a happier life, including quick lists to help create mindful moments throughout your day and action prompts to further your positivity journey.
Choose a list at random or work through them one by one. Whenever you’re in need of a boost, you can come back and add new things or remind yourself of encouraging thoughts and reminders you’ve written. List Happy is the perfect way to take time out for yourself, focus on the here and now, and remember all the good things in life.
Spreads
Here are a few spreads from the book.
Some of my favourite artworks in the book
I loved all the artworks and it was wonderful to get to illustrate in my bright colours. There are chapter openers, half-page illustrations and then lots of other illustrations of a variety of sizes through the book, with spots throughout. 190 illustrations in total!
It’s really very hard to pick favourites, but here are a few that I particularly love!
Process
I did all the work for this book in Adobe Fresco and handed files over as Illustrator-editable PDFs that Fresco will save out.
Each of the main artworks would start with a brief, which would usually be fairly simple, and would mention anything essential that had to be include. I would then draw a rough.
Sometimes there would be feedback and changes on the rough, while some would be ready to colour. Once the roughs were approved, I then laid down the colour. Sometimes there were changes after the colour was finished, too, though less than at rough stage, as I do fairly detailed roughs.
Most of the spots were drawn straight to colour, and some of them a number at a time and then extracted into their own files.
Pre-order the book
I can’t wait to get my copies of the book – not just to see me artwork in it, but because I’m really looking forward to going through it and learning from Vanessa’s extensive experience and get better at noticing all the good things.
You can pre-order the book now from:
Or why not ask your local independent book store to order a copy in for you?
I’d love to know if you do buy a copy, and if you have any favourite artworks from it.
Lifestyle illustrator: Illustrating everyday objects
My sketchbooks (and possibly even more so, my notebooks, as I HAVE TO doodle while planning, listening and so on) are full of quick little sketches of mugs (lots of mugs, to be honest) and lamps, and pens and scissors. (They’re also full of flowers and weird and quirky faces and folk-art style kinda symmetrical patterns. I should maybe do a whole blog posts on sketchbook, notebook and random post-it doodles.)
If in doubt, just draw what’s in front of you. To I almost always have a huge list of ideas of things I want to draw or sketches I’ve done that can be worked up to final – not to mention actual client work with specific things to draw. But there are still times when I’ll sit in a café or on a park bench and pull out my sketchbook and not know what to draw, but want to draw something. And there is literally ALWAYS something there to draw, so we can never really have the excuse of not knowing what to draw, can we?
I think I probably claim a lot of things are my favourite thing to draw, but I definitely have an overriding joy of documenting the everyday. That can be documenting emotions and scenes, but it is often just capturing the handful of things I can see on a shelf or the random collection of junk sitting in the corner, or the bits and pieces sat on top of the cupboard… Oh!! I knew there was a reason to be a cluttered, not overly tidy person! Because I do think it’s generally far more interesting to draw a busy and cluttered space than a clear and clean shelf with nothing askew at all.
Sketchbook glimpses of everyday objects
Here are a handful of sketches and doodles of everyday objects from flicking through some of my sketchbooks and notebooks and the piles of post-its on my desk (yes, it’s a messy cluttered desk, obviously… even when I tidy it, it will still be pretty cluttered).
Drawing challenges
I do (start, at least) a lot of drawing challenges, whether ones I make up for myself, ones that stem from a class or membership I’m part of, or just big global Instagram challenges. I’ve found I’m most happy to do ones that last around a month, as I get bored if I try to go up to 100 days. Quick-draw daily challenges are great for a bunch of things – practising something you’re rusty at drawing, leaning into a new style direction, or just flexing your muscles in a different way to the client work you’re working on.
Last year, I did a lot of A to Z challenges, including an A to Z of Everyday Life, and an A to Z of Household Objects (didn’t finish that one because I had client work that required some long hours).
I also did around a month where I drew a particular subject matter on different days of the week (and one day was objects).
Illustrating everyday objects within scenes
The sketching and doodling and the drawing challenges all feed into final illustrations, whether personal work or client work. Including those little details in room illustrations, like a glass of water, pair of glasses or inhaler, or putting stuff on shelves in the background of illustrations of people interacting or doing things, makes all the difference, I think. And the inclusion of everyday objects can make illustrations more relatable and also tell a story.
Here are a few where you can see a variety of everyday objects.
List of things to draw
It’s really handy to have a list somewhere (on your phone is probably easiest?) of everyday objects to draw, so you’re not always limited to what’s in front of you. Most of them you should probably be able to draw from memory, but you can always look up some references if you need to. Here’s a short list of ideas you can use if you like – or come up with your own list. There are 31, so you can use if for a month-long challenge if you want to.
31 everyday objects to draw
And here they are in text, so you can copy and paste them if you like.
- Mug
- Teaspoon
- Bar of soap
- Shampoo bottle
- Whisk
- Kettle
- Pair of scissors
- Headphones
- Mobile phone
- Sketchbook
- Sandal
- Broom
- Trowel
- Clothes peg
- Washing powder (or liquid or sheets)
- Microwave
- Watering can
- Toilet brush
- Hairbrush
- Toothbrush
- Washing-up brush
- Pencil sharpener
- Lanyard
- Teapot
- House key
- Spanner
- Measuring tape
- Bottle of sanitiser
- Face mask
- Nail varnish
- Purse
Life as an illustrator: My illustration process
NOTE: There’s a lot of video in this post, so it may take a while to load for you!
Since quite a few people who read this blog are illustrators and because I love reading other illustrators’ blog posts about their process, I thought I’d start a series of posts about being an illustrator, to intersperse with the posts about the different things that I tend to illustrate. I am fascinated at the glimpses we can get into different illustration processes and love seeing timelapses popping up on my Instagram feed or watching some of the videos other illustrators share on their Patreons or blogs.
This isn’t for the purposes of copying them, but just to get an insight in different ways to go about things, I think. Sometimes you’ll see a really useful shortcut or tool you’ve not fully explored. Other times you’ll just appreciate the differences and understand that, while you love a certain illustrator’s work, their process is not one you’d want to explore – perhaps because it takes too long, or because it feels too repetitive, or because it doesn’t give the opportunity for looseness and embracing mistakes, or because it’s too digital, or too messy and requires a bigger working space than you have …
So, when I’m sharing my process here, it’s for the same purpose – perhaps you’ll spot a neat little trick that you hadn’t tried before, perhaps it will help you understand that you prefer proper paints and pencils, perhaps it will make you try out Adobe Fresco and find something you love in there… Or perhaps, you’ll just enjoy a little glimpse into another creative mind. How lucky we are these days to be able to see into so many different creative minds around the world.
Sketching
I almost always start with sketching and I almost always do that sketching on the iPad. I work on an iPad Mini (5, with Apple Pencil first generation), which is really very portable (it fits in my small bag along with a notebook, mini sketchbook and a pen and pencil – and my purse, phone, a couple of masks, a reusable tote bag with a beautiful pattern on from the V&A, my inhaler, my house key, and usually a hair band or two!). I might one day by a bigger iPad and possibly a Pro, but for the moment I can do everything I want on the dinky one.
And I do the bulk of the work in Adobe Fresco (sometimes absolutely everything, in fact). When I sketch in Fresco, I sketch with the pixel pencils and my favourite is the charcoal pencil, which I *think* is one that comes with Fresco, but it *might* be a Kyle Webster brush as I do have a bunch of them downloaded. If you didn’t know this already, Adobe Fresco allows you to work in both pixel and vector and you just have different layers for each. Some illustrators make great use of this by drawing flat vector style work and then adding pixel texture in. I just use the pixel for sketching and the vector for final. It might be that I’ll explore using pixel texture in future, but for now I prefer a flatter style and adding any texture with pattern or mark-making (but still vector).
I used to draw directly into Photoshop on a Microsoft Surface or Wacom Cintiq, and I do still sometimes use both to draw in Fresco, but rarely to draw in Photoshop anymore, just because Fresco and the ability to draw in vector and have a loose hand-drawn look that is still a non-destructive vector is far preferable to me. It’s very likely I’ll adjust my process and style down the line as I think we tend to always be growing and adapting our processes and styles. But for now Adobe Fresco is perfect for me.
So, I’ll start with sketches:
Some sketches are super quick to draw, some take a few iterations (especially if it’s client work, where they might realise they need some extra bits, or to change the composition, and so on, though I also like to sit on a sketch for a few days if I have time, because then I will often spot tweaks to make or potential for rejigging the composition) and some take quite a while, especially when they incorporate a whole scene. My sketches are almost always in layers, so that elements can be moved around. Sometimes I merge a sketch down before starting to colour, especially if it’s very complex, as it can slow down the iPad if I don’t. But I prefer to keep the sketch layers, if I can, as then I can hide everything I’m not currently drawing in colour so as not to distract.
Here are a couple of sketch process videos:
Sketching is almost always the part of the process that takes the longest. It can often also include researching reference images, too. Sometimes I’ll gather a number of photos of people in a particular kind of pose or, if I need to draw a specific flower or an animal, I’ll gather a number of photos and then draw based on a combination of what I see in those photos. I would very rarely draw directly from a photo without making a good number of changes. Often, when sketching a scene, I will mess around with the composition and scale quite a bit before feeling happy with it. I tend to do sketching with silence or a particular music that fits the feel of the piece. It’s concentration work in a similar way to editing (with my educational publishing hat on).
Adding colour
I then usually group the sketch and put it on top with a multiply blend mode, so that the sketch will appear on top of what I’m drawing. And then I go in and draw all the elements bit by bit – again, everything is kept in layers, and I group the layers together, so that each person will be a whole group (and they probably have their head and hair as a group, their legs as a group, etc.
I use flat colour and I tend to draw with a customised vector brush (sometimes I use the new manga brushes too, which can be quite nice), but mostly I use my default customised brush. (Roundness = 50%, Angle = 90°, Taper Mode = Velocity, Begin and End Taper = 0%, Pressure dynamics = 100%, Velocity dynamics = 0%)
I have a library with my go-to colours, which I update now and then (I recently added quite a few more pinks and blues, but I’m feeling the need for a few more greens, too). Keeping a consistent colour palette (which tends toward a lot of bright colours, as you may have noticed!) is definitely a part of my style. I will sometimes pull out a handful of colours for a limited palette, but they will still come from my default colour library. And, as it’s a Creative Cloud library it’s available to me within Adobe Fresco, whether I’m on the iPad, my Surface Book or on my desktop and using the Cintiq. (And it’s also available in the desktop Illustrator and Photoshop apps, so I never have to guess or eyedrop.)
Here are a couple of process videos showing the colouring stage:
Colouring is usually less time-consuming than sketching, though for some particularly complex pieces it can take longer. Sometimes you can cut some time by duplicating elements – for example, in the garden scene above a number of the flowers are used multiple times. Colouring can be quite a mindful and calming part of the process, but it’s also a less brain-heavy one, which means I will often do it in front of the TV or listening to podcasts. Sometimes the colouring can get a little tedious, so having something else to concentrate on helps.
Going straight to colour
Very occasionally I will draw straight to colour, using the vector tools, without sketching first. I’d really love to be able to do this more, as it would speed my process up a lot, but I’m not sure I’d want to let go of the sketch stage for client work, because so much can get decided there.
Here’s a process video of one that I went straight to colour on. I do like this one and can see the potential, so may try to do this a bit more often with personal work going forward to see if I can’t streamline my process a bit more. And I do think it retains a bit more looseness that sometimes is lost with the sketch and then colour process.
Notes about finalising
One thing to watch out for in Fresco is that you might end up with what looks like a single piece of flat colour, but it’s actually got multiple fragments of the same colour. While it’s not a huge problem, I try to consolidate them as I go, because it can keep the file size down and helps if you are going to take the final files into Illustrator to tidy up and finalise (e.g. if you’re going to be uploading to a stock site you would be best doing that or it might get rejected and, for client work, the in-house designer may well need it in as clean a state as possible).
The other thing to watch out for (though note that I haven’t tested this in a while, so it might have been sorted in a recent update) is that if you use clipping layers on vector Fresco will spit them out as pixel layers rather than vector. Which is why I manually delete the edges of texture etc. rather than just clipping it (which would be way quicker and easier!).
Currently, you can’t name your layers in Fresco, and I’m very big on properly organised and labelled final files, so my preference, if there is time, is to finalises in Illustrator (or Photoshop, depending on client requirements) and tidy up and consolidate and group everything and name the layers. Note that currently you can save as PSD or PDF (but the PDF is an Illustrator-compatible file). There’s an annoying thing that all the layer groups, when you open in Illustrator there’s always a weird empty clipping layer that serves no useful (that I can see anyway – any Adobe Fresco experts, do tell me if there is a purpose!) purpose. If you find one of these and select it and then select all with the same appearance you can get rid of them all in one go.
If I’m just supplying straight from Fresco (either saving out as PSD or the Illustrator-compatible PDF) I’ll still do a certain amount of tidying before handing the files over. I’ll usually remove the sketch layer(s). I’ll make sure that all the elements are grouped sensibly (as I usually do this as I go along it’s just a case of checking I haven’t missed anything out). I’ll check for any hidden layers and see if they should be visible and, if not, delete them. I’ll also check for any stray colour elements (see above) – if you try to fill with a different colour and it doesn’t fill the whole space you can tell it’s not consolidated. If you fill it all with the same colour and then double-tap with the fill tool that usually does the trick. If it’s a single motif or element, rather than a full scene, I’ll make sure to remove the background layer.
And then I’ll file everything away in the right folders and save the final files to a specific folder in Creative Cloud, which I’ll then send a link to the client so they can pick up the files from there. I usually have folders for roughs, final sketches, colour, final colour and final files. I’ll keep all the in between folders and files in Fresco (Creative Cloud saves them in the cloud anyway) and just put the final files and JPG/PNGs of the sketches in the main project folder. I try to keep Fresco organised into folders, though I do often just pick it up and create a new file without putting it in the right place, so do have tidy it up every so often. (I haven’t got to the point of archiving old Fresco files, but I imagine I will run out of Creative Cloud space at some point and need to do that, at which point I’ll have to decide whether or not I want any of those in between files. If I’ve saved out a final Illustrator or Photoshops layered file, and have JPG/PNGs of the original sketches, it’s almost certainly not necessary!
Thank you for reading and watching!
I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into my process. In the future I might do a screen recording of me drawing in Fresco on the Wacom and talking through it as I go. But I need to sort out the right software and also have some time where I can sit recording with no-one else in the room, which is not something that can happen very often, due to sharing my office space with my husband.
If you’re an illustrator and have shared your process in a blog post or YouTube video, pop a link in the comments. I’d love to have a nosy!
Lifestyle illustrator: Illustrating people
Drawing people used to be something I shied away from, concentrating more on flowers and objects. Because drawing people feels like something that requires more responsibility – representing the diversity of human life and somehow giving as many people as possible an image that they can relate to in some way. Because, well, it’s hard and takes practice and a lot of observation.
But now? Drawing people really is one of my favourite things. While I do still default to drawing women of probably around my own age, I have started drawing more men and I am working on including a variety of body shapes, as well as continuing to ensure I draw a diversity of ethnicity (and not just by changing skin colour and keeping everything the same). And I love continuing to grow in how I draw people – finding new ways to stylise, drawing more postures, drawing people moving more, digging deeper with clothes and they sit…
Illustrating women
I think it’s safe to say that I draw a lot of women. My defaults if I’m not sure what to draw are a stylised flower of some kind or a woman (and usually that woman will be white and of a similar age and build to me, because really my default is an unconscious self-portrait (and I love flowers).
Illustrating groups of people
Thankfully I get asked to draw a variety of people, and I also set myself briefs to ensure I don’t just draw women. Illustrating groups of people or drawing scenes with quite a few people in, are great fun, and it’s good to get the opportunity to draw a wider diversity of people.
Illustrating scenes with people in
I enjoy illustrating scenes, though obviously they can take quite a long time, because adding in all the little details is great fun. And, as with illustrating groups, you can look to include some diversity and see how far you can escape stereotypes.
Illustrating children
I definitely tend to draw more adults than children, but I love getting the opportunity to draw more and find it fascinating how the proportions change with age, as well how much diversity you can get in a single small class of children, even just in terms of height and body shape.
Illustrating teenagers
Illustrating teenagers and tweens is fun, because they’re closer to adults, and therefore fairly similar in proportions, but they often have fun clothes or accessories to include! Plus, they are all freaking amazing! (Not just saying that because mine are that age. Nope.)
Illustrating men
Yeah. I definitely need to draw more men! Other than within groups I have barely any drawings of men. I have this guy, who is supposed to represent the patriarchy. My dad who I drew for his birthday this year. This random dude (found this in my ‘daily drawing’ files and don’t know if it’s supposed to be anyone in particular).
Hope you’ve enjoyed looking at this selection of illustrated people. If you have a project that includes illustrating people, and you like my style, do get in touch! And if you’re an illustrator, I’d love to know if you have particular types of people you prefer to illustrate and if you challenge yourself to draw the ones that you don’t default to.
Lifestyle illustrator: Illustrating rooms
I think drawing rooms has become one of my absolute favourites. (Though I realise I probably say that about a lot of things, and my favourite may change depending on what I’m doing the most of at any one time – usually the thing I’m in the thick of is the thing I feel happiest about, but occasionally, if I’ve agreed to draw something that maybe isn’t really ‘me’ I might be feeling it’s the least favourite.)
My love of drawing rooms goes way back to when I was a kid of seven or eight years (I know this because I remember it being after moving house, which we did when I was seven, and before we went to live in Spain for a year, which we did when I was nine). I spent hours drawing bathrooms. Every piece of paper I could get my hands on – including the backs of envelopes and cereal boxes – I drew bathrooms. They frequently had naked women in them too – I assume because you do usually have to take your clothes off in a bathroom, not for any other nefarious reasons! I also remember that I would almost always include a shower in these bathrooms, even though we only had a bath in our bathroom, because I loved showers and really wanted one. (I do have one now, thankfully, and am very very grateful for it, because it is responsible for making me feel awake and ready to face the day.)
Illustrated bathrooms
So, no surprise that I have drawn a fair few bathrooms (and showers, and toilets…) Anyone out there looking for an illustrator to create a book of bathroom illustrations? I’m sure there’s a nice market for that somewhere.
Illustrated living rooms
The living room can be a real window into the soul of a family. And I love adding in lots of little details that give clues to the family who hangs out in my living room illustrations. You may notice that my rooms are all fairly maximalist. And anyone who’s been to our house will not be surprised about that! That said, I do tend to draw rooms that have a bit more of an organised maximalism than is present in our house – perhaps they are wishful thinking rooms. And perhaps one day I’ll repaint the walls and neaten up the bookshelves and hang that gallery wall I’ve been wanting for ages, and put up the cute little mini shelf units I bought more than a year ago and… Or maybe I’ll just keep drawing the living room I want and somehow use that to manifest it, without actually having to do any work?
Illustrated kitchens
Kitchens are also (or sometimes more so) the window into a family life. Our kitchen is tiny, but our dining room is kind of an extension to it and we do spend a decent amount of time around the table (though less and less as the teen and almost teen have their own commitments). We aim to eat dinner at the table every day, and maybe succeed four or five days a week. When I draw kitchens, some elements will be based on our life, but I’ll also sometimes throw in some wishes, too. Though one of these kitchen illustrations is more of a feeling of a kitchen, and not quite as maximalist as my usual.
My ideal kitchen is a large one with a big range cooker and huge fridge freezer and lots of beautiful pots and pans and crockery and a really big farmhouse dining table and a double butcher sink (that I really don’t want to call a butcher sink, now I think about it!) and maybe even a sofa. A proper full-on living kitchen where everyone hangs out. Since it’s not too far off nest-flying time, I think that’s probably a wish that will stay unfulfilled. Would be a bit ridiculous to get one when there are only two of us to make use of it!
Illustrated bedrooms
When I was looking through my work to find pieces for this blog post, I was surprised to find that I hadn’t drawn any bedrooms. So I devoted some of my free drawing time over the past week to drawing this bedroom illustration. Again, it has some basis in our bedroom (though doesn’t show the other side of our bedroom, which is our office space), but also tells a bit of a story through some of the details, I hope.
Illustrated reading spaces
If you know me, you’ll know I’m a big reader (though a slower reader than I’d like, because there are sooooo many books I want to ready and new ones coming out all the time). So I wasn’t too surprised to find a few reading nook illustrations.
Illustrated studio
An attic studio illustration! Our attic used to be a full room for our offices – with an additional desk in the middle that had a spare computer for the kids to use. That was mostly before I was illustrating – I think we still had it when I was starting to get back into drawing and colouring and making patterns, because I remember clearing out a bookcase full of crime thrillers (that, for some reason, I couldn’t read after having children – not sure what’s up with that!) to make space for art supplies. (I now have two whole book cases, an art trolley and far too much floor space for art supplies (including lots of inspiration books – I think that’s maybe a topic for another blog post some time!) When the kids got older, though, they really needed their own rooms, so we had to rearrange the house and half the attic is our bedroom and the other half our office (kind of divided with some bookcases, not a proper wall, or anything. We also got our living room back when that happened, as all the toys migrated to their rooms, so that was nice (though I was very happy to having a living room full of toys when they were little).
Anyway… all this is to say, that I would so very much love the whole attic back and just for me for an attic studio – with room for an easel, a drawing table, all the tech and space for all the art supplies to be out and at hand. And wall space to put pictures and moodboards up… and space for all those inspiration books and magazines. I’d settle for a garden studio. Or even a basement studio, as long as it didn’t flood every few years. A room of my own… Please?
This is a kind of idealised studio illustration, though I think if I drew one today, it would probably have a lot more in it.
If you’re looking for a room illustrator for a project, whether a whole book, a magazine cover, some room illustrations for social media posts or maybe even an illustration of a new furniture range in some aspirational rooms for a furniture catalogue or similar… get in touch, because I would really love to draw even more rooms! And if you’re an individual who would love a print of any of these room illustrations, let me know in the comments, as I’m going to be investigating some different print fulfilment options soon it would be good to know what prints to offer first.
Food illustrator: Uses for food illustration
This is part of a series of blog posts about different uses for illustration (particularly focusing on the themes and topics that I like to illustrate).
While I don’t especially like to pigeon-hole myself too much, I do tend to think of myself as a lifestyle illustrator, with a particular focus on, or love of, illustrating the everyday. And food illustration most certainly falls within everyday illustration, while also being able to encompass luxury and aspiration.
I think there can be a tendency to assume that the main use for food illustration would be cook books, but there are many potential uses for food illustration!
Potential uses for food illustration
Illustrating branded packaging
For example, for food and drink brands for their social media, newsletters, or even advertising
Illustrated recipes
For example, for recipe cards, cook books, food magazines or food columns in newspapers
Illustrating meals and kitchen objects
For example, for cook books, food magazines, lifestyle books and articles, social media posts, wall art
Illustrating individual food items
For example, for nutritional lists, food books, lifestyle social media or online articles, packaging for food companies
Illustrating drinks
For example, for drink industry advertising and social media, food and drink magazines, cocktail books, or maybe just general lifestyle purposes to illustrate the variety of rituals and comfort that goes with drinks of different kinds
Illustrating types of food or nutrition types
For example, for instructional leaflets, posters, presentations, for tote bags, or packaging for fruit and veg companies
If you’re a food illustrator, what types of uses have you illustrated for? I’m sure there are lots more that I haven’t covered here!
If you’re an art director or designer commissioning illustrations, what purposes have you used food illustration for?
And, if you’re looking to commission some food illustration, and you feel my style would work for your purposes, please do reach out – see the Get in Touch page for my contact information and see the Food & Drink part of my portfolio for more examples of my food illustration.
2022 Word for the year
It’s hard to go into 2022 with a positive attitude when the Covid numbers here are scarily high:
And when some of those closest to me are going through really shitty times.
But… I’m an optimist and so I am going to do my utmost to come down on the side of hope and see if I can manifest a better year. And, really, given the circumstances, this year hasn’t been all that awful. Two out of the four of us are double-vaxed and boosted and the other two should be double-vaxed by the end of February. So far, we have (as far as we know) escaped Covid. We have managed to get out there a little bit (though not outside the UK still), with trips to London, Bristol, Cornwall, Edinburgh and Carnoustie. We have seen (not all of us for all of them) a bunch of musicals, the circus, live fireworks and ridden many fairground rides (and I am now sworn off them after bruising my rib on the Twister!).
The final quarter of the year has been filled with illustration work for me, working on multiple books, alongside 1–2 days of project management, which I’ve found a really nice balance. My illustration career goal for 2022 is ‘MORE BOOKS, PLEASE’ – so do get in touch if you have any book illustration projects you’d like me to work on from February onwards. I’d especially love to work on some plant-based cookery or nutrition books, but I’m very open to other projects, too. They don’t have to be books, either, though I definitely wouldn’t be sad if 2022 ended up jam-packed with book illustration projects.
So… my word for the year for 2022 is…
EXPLORE!
I like my words of the year to have multiple meanings and applications and this is, I feel, a good one.
- Obviously, I’m hopeful that there will come a point in 2022 when international travel becomes easier and I can get back to exploring Europe and maybe further afield, and be able to take the kids (currently there are many countries they wouldn’t be allowed in yet as they only have the one vaccine so far), if they want to come.
- But I’ve enjoyed some exploring in the United Kingdom this year and would love to do more of that, especially hoping to fit in a few solo city breaks and sit in cafés people watching, wander round art galleries and museums and get my city steps in. (And I’ll be sure to share any travels, domestic or global, on my travel insta, which has been somewhat neglected the last couple of years!)
- I also want to do more creative exploration – playing with different media and taking 15–30 minutes out of every day to do something different to what I’m working on at the time (and hopefully sharing that exploration on my sketchbook insta) – plus I’ve signed up for a few online art classes this year, so will hopefully be able to carve out enough time to truly delve into those. I also think there may be some style exploration, as I’m starting to feel the call of pixels and texture (see the picture above, for example). But I feel that call every now and then and usually come back ‘home’ to my flatter vector style, so we’ll see if that manifests or not.
- I want to continue literary exploration – reading is such an amazing way to discover new worlds, cultures, people, or just new stories about ordinary and fairly familiar life. You can see what I‘ve been reading this year on my reading insta, though I am actually slightly behind in updating it. I’d also really like to flex my writing muscles again and see if any of the many stories in my head will come out in something resembling coherent form! And if they don’t, at least I’d like to get back to writing here and in my newsletter – did you sign up to it yet? – about illustration, life and whatever else comes up.
- I want to get better at culinary exploration, particularly in terms of all the delicious food that plants can give us. I’m embarking on Veganuary this year and hoping to stick with it, and beyond. But, even if I don’t fully succeed, I want to experiment, and explore, more things to do with vegetables and rely less on eggs and cheese. (Hmm, maybe I’ll need a food insta! Or maybe I need to explore how to cut back on my Insta addiction!)
- And I want to continue exploring Tasha Goddard and who she actually is and what she actually stands for and believes in. Because that’s actually kinda fun and interesting and eye-opening.
Do you have a word for the year? Do you have intentions and hopes for 2022, or are you still wary of them? I know I went a bit crazy this time two years ago with a word for the year and one for the decade and a bunch of optimistic hopes. Yeah, oops.
Whether you’ve got a word for the year, a gazillion goals, or are just hoping to make it through the year intact, I wish you a HAPPY NEW YEAR and hope it proves all you want and then some more.
See you on the other side.
Creative play
My style (see previous post about style exploration) is mostly quite flat, with little traditional texture (I do like to add texture with scribbles, mark-making and blocks of colour, though). And I love this style and have settled into it and it (currently – style is something that evolves with you and mine has definitely evolved over the last few years) feels very much like ‘home’.
But it’s so important, I feel, to include creative play in your schedule. And on a regular basis, too, whether that be daily, weekly or setting aside a couple of full days every month, or even a whole week or two each quarter.
Play with new media or tools. Play around with different colour palettes, or limited palettes – or throw in a mass of colour, if you usually use a very limited palette. Explore different subject matter, or go abstract. Try out making patterns if you normally do placement pieces or editorial illustration. Have a go at drawing for the children’s market, if that’s not your usual area…
Play for fun and to grow and learn
At the very least, playing can be fun. It gives you the chance to explore without needing to keep to a brief, or narrow your focus. But often it can give a lot more back than that. Even if it’s not something that ends up directly feeding into your future work, you will have flexed some different creative muscles, you might have gleaned some nuggets of insight about colour that use to tweak something in your next client piece, you might have learnt something about composition from working on an abstract piece that then feeds into a children’s book…
Mindful art practice
I also try to fit in a fair bit of what I feel is mindful art practice. If it’s digital, this often uses the symmetry tools in Photoshop or Procreate. I especially love watching a mandala-style piece grow almost organically!
To share or not to share?
… that is the question.
I love sharing. Possibly a bit too much. I tend to share my sketchbook work and some of my creative play (not all of it, but a lot of it) on Instagram. More recently, I’ve started dabbling in using reels and stories, which are still really quite alien to me, and I never seem to get my process videos the right length to work properly as a reel and it ends up wanting to take some video of my coffee table or the cat (hmm, maybe I should let it video the cat – cats are big on social media, right?). People have advised that stories are a great place to share creative play, especially when you’re not entirely sure you like it, but you want to get it out there to satisfy that urge to share!
I do like the feedback you get from sharing to the main Instagram feed though. Especially when you get new people commenting or finding you because of something different you’re trying. But then it messes with the grid, darnit! I have wondered if it might be an idea to have a separate sketchbook and creative play insta account. (I do already have three instas, though the other two or not specific to art – one is my travel account, which I’m clearly posting to constantly at the moment; and the other is my reading account, where I post a photo and sometimes some actual thoughts on the books I read.)
What about you?
I’d love to hear what you do. Do you post everything to the same Instagram account, or do you have a separate one for sketchbooks and creative play? Or even two for different styles and markets?
And what about having a sketchbook and creative play page on your portfolio? Do art directors like to see this? I’ve certainly heard a lot of anecdotes about art directors asking to see sketchbooks before commissioning an illustrator, though not had that experience myself.
Style exploration
I recently took Tom Froese’s new class on Skillshare, The Style Class: Work Out Your Illustration Style in a Daily Project. (If you don’t already subscribe to Skillshare, you can try it for 14 days free with this link.)
This involved doing a daily drawing, using the alphabet to keep you going, and picking a theme. I picked ‘everyday life’ which, in hindsight, may have been a little too open, but then I do especially love drawing lifestyle pieces of various kinds (see the Lifestyle section on my portfolio, for example), so it may have been the right thing to choose. Having the A to Z as the framework really helped me keep up – I have tried so many times to do a daily project and almost always fall down after a week or two, but I didn’t this time. (Though I did end up two days late, having missed a couple of days – one because I was on a very long walk and another because I didn’t feel well and ended up going to bed at 5pm. I don’t mind this so much, though – it’s the giving up completely that I didn’t want.)
Here is a collation of them all:
If you like process videos, I posted quite a lot on Instagram.
Things I learnt…
1. If I’m going to do a daily drawing project, I need to pick simpler things as some of these took me hours! (Not that I didn’t love those hours, but I do have some limits to time.) So, I have already started another A to Z, this time of fruit and veg and just drawing one piece of each per day (except… I’m already thinking that maybe there should be 2–3 examples of each one on each day, which still wouldn’t take a huge amount of time, but gives more variety and, frankly, more interest for the actual drawing), but also doing a weekly room/scene that I will take my time taking from sketch to final, so I can dig into the detail more.
2. Texture is not (currently – I know that style evolves and that this may change) for me (except for texture from mark-making and pattern). Some of the earlier ones had me going for it with the Procreate brushes and, while there is nothing wrong with them, as such, they don’t feel as much like me.
3. I do love drawing rooms and scenes (e.g. R is for reading, K is for kitchen, A is for attic, L is for laundry…) and adding little details, but they take TIME!
4. I also love list-style pieces – e.g. T is for tea, U is for underwear, V is for vitamins…
5. I really do need to work on nailing a style and technique for drawing people. And that is already on my list of areas to work on this year (drawing people and learning more about how to animate my illustrations are my focuses for the first quarter of the year, at least).
6. Colour is a big thing for me and I love making colourful pieces and having a colourful portfolio and Insta feed.
7. I don’t use much line, but I did actually really love the O is for oranges, where I needed to add some fine lines to the outlines of the oranges to separate them in the bowl. I think I’d like to explore adding more fine lines here and there going forward, so we’ll see how that progresses.
8. Symmetry and pattern – it’s fun to add some of this to an individual piece (e.g. I is for ink and M is for marmite) and allows me to incorporate pattern a bit more. And, if you know my work at all, you’ll know I LOVE symmetry! (For my next A to Z I’m planning to use the pieces to make patterns, though. Initially some very simple ones and then possibly some mixed tossed patterns with a bunch of them.)
9. Not sure I’ve quite nailed a style for the writing, yet, so need to work on developing that, as well. I tend to mix it up quite a bit and would be good to be a bit more consistent (even if I end up with two or three different writing styles, so I can still mix it up somewhat). Actually, I like the I is for Ink and G is for Gin text the best, where there’s a mix of thicker block capitals and lower-case cursive. Maybe that’s the direction to try to go in first.
This was such a fun project and I highly recommend it for helping you work out, or confirm, your style – or even just to giver you something to draw, if you don’t always know what to draw next!
Memories
A year ago today, Jenny Goddard (aka Mama, aka Jenny Scott Smith, aka Jenny Zamenhof Goddard) passed away. I can’t quite believe it’s been a whole year, but also can’t quite believe that it wasn’t only a few weeks ago. (To be fair, a lot of that disconnect with time is down to the weirdness of being in Coronavirus lockdown, but I imagine I’d have similar feelings without it.)
I have had (and continue to have) big plans about a commemorative project of some kind that combines portraits of her, with drawings of things and places that are integral to her (I have pages in one of my sketchbooks with little doodles of Golden Virginia packets, sorobans, Rubik’s cubes, Esperanto stars (and speech bubbles with other languages in, too), passports, Spectrums, cannabis leaves (yeah, she’s dead – I think it’s OK to admit that she spent a significant amount of life under the influence of marijuana – I, of course, never inhaled), sci fi books, oil pastels, waitressing trays, knitted patchwork skirts, and much, much more.
I’ve not done more than draw/paint (it’s digital – I’m never positive what to call it) three portraits, draw the sketches and think a whole bunch. Today, I took the day off from work to spend time on Jenny in some way. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but sat down in the morning with a sketchbook and, instead of drawing, I wrote down elements of Jenny and stories an anecdotes I felt like sharing.
And the following is the evening result of typing those up (while sat in the shade of the back garden and under greater and greater influence of Prosecco – and a glass of Rioja with dinner because Jenny liked a glass of Rioja – so apologies if it gets less and less lucid as it reaches the final themes).
I have many more little stories and anecdotes and character traits that I would love to share in written form, like this. I imagine the art project will also come to fruition at some point, but I have realised that there is no law that says it must be completed by a particular time after her death. I will continue to remember and think of her, as will others whose lives she was in, whether or not it’s recorded or memorialised in written or artistic form. (That said, please do share any of your own stories, anecdotes or art inspired by Jenny.)
Jenny the actor
Brenda from Birmingham
When I was little Jenny used to have this other personality, called Brenda. Brenda had a Brummie accent and that’s mostly all I can remember about her, except that Jenny would ‘be’ Brenda for what felt like ages and would refuse to admit she was actually Jenny. It was done out of fun (I assume!), but it was actually a little bit scary at the time. When she’d first switch to Brenda it would make me giggle and laugh so much, but the determination with which she stuck as Brenda felt a little scary after a while and I can still feel that doubt and the little whirring in my young brain trying to work out what was real and what wasn’t.
The visiting Czechs
One time, when I was either seven or eight (it was during my home education years, after we started learning Esperanto and before we moved to Spain) we’d been to Cheltenham for the day (I really can’t remember what we’d been doing there, but there’s a fairly decent chance it was a museum, art gallery or something else that would count as an educational trip) and we were hitching back to Painswick (we did a lot of hitching in those days – I’m not certain whether that was due to a paucity in public transport or because we didn’t have the money, or could even have just been a general enjoyment of hitching and meeting people for a brief moment in time, but not long enough to have to get to know them or worry about what they thought of us). While we stood with our thumbs out, Jenny suggested we could pretend to be from another country and we could speak Esperanto to each other. We decided we needed to pick an obscure country rather than one where a British person would have a decent chance of at least recognising the language. So we picked Czech. To be honest, this was a little risky, as we travelling from Cheltenham, which was the Gloucestershire hotspot of Esperanto at the time (with a whole couple of dozen Esperantists who would meet once a month for an evening of chatting in Esperanto, and singing songs and looking at slides – many of them of trains, because three of the Esperantists in the group were also trainspotters). Oh yes, and the group was made up entirely of people over 70 (possibly over 80), except for me and Jenny! I suppose we would have known any Esperantists who picked us up and would have spoken to them in Esperanto. Anyway, we were picked up by an elderly (I thought – bear in mind I was seven or eight at the time, so they may actually have been in their 40s!) couple who gave us lots of advice about places to visit in Gloucestershire. It was a fun thing and I have a feeling we tried it a couple more times and may have actually ended up getting a lift from Bob, the Esperantist engineer who lived in Painswick and normally gave us a lift to and from Esperanto meetings.
Green aliens
Jenny and her best friend, Vicky, (also my best friend’s mum) set up a drama group at Roxborough House in Stroud. They used to go to a grown-up drama group there and enjoyed it and thought it would be great to have a group for kids, playing similar drama games. This was also during my home-educated years, when Jenny and Brian made sure I had lots of opportunities to do things with groups that I was missing out of at school – so I went to swimming, trampoline and gymnastics classes, as well as this drama group. It was great fun – we played lots of games and laughed a lot. They decided it would be cool to have an end-of-year play and we did one about some aliens arriving on Earth and how strange everything seemed to them. I don’t really remember the content of the play that much, but I do remember that Jenny and I played an alien and her child and we had our heads covered in tin foil and green face paint all over us and I think were probably otherwise dressed in black t-shirt and black leggings. Jenny was actually very good at acting and could take on an entirely different persona seemingly at the drop of the hat (and the previous story about the hitch-hiking make-believe was not uncommon – often we would just give ourselves different names and have very slightly different lives, like living in a fancier house, or having a different job, or having two brothers, and so on. It was a really useful way to push away the nerves of getting up on stage and I have used it in my working life, as well as in the few drama productions I was in during my teenage years. Essentially, if you create a persona who is confident and knows what they are talking about and has every right to be up on that stage/running that meeting/speaking to a conference, then you believe it and you come across that way. (There is a risk of getting sucked in to believing you’re always acting the part, though, and forgetting that you do have the knowledge, experience and right to be speaking – classic impostor syndrome.)
Jenny’s tips for self-defence
I’ve mentioned hitch-hiking a few times now. This was a huge part of my childhood. Jenny and I hitched to Europe to go Esperanto congresses and events. We hitched round the UK a bit, visiting family. And we frequently hitched from Painswick to Stroud or Cheltenham, and sometimes Gloucester (though it was a lot harder to hitch to Gloucester because there wasn’t really a good place to stand). I was very comfortable with this as a mode of transport and no concept of it being rude to be taking lifts for free. Jenny did, however, always make sure that I understood the possible dangers and had strategies to deal with them – the worst-case scenario being opening the door and jumping out of a moving car (child locks were pretty rare then – as were seatbelts!). The biggest issue she came up against – she often hitchhiked on her own, as well as with me or with Brian – was men expecting, or hoping, to be paid for the lift in a non-financial way. I’m not sure how often she encountered this, but it definitely came up more than once. And it happened one time while I was there, too – the driver putting his hand on her leg, while I was sat in the back. I wasn’t really aware of it, until we got out of the car not hugely far from where we’d got in and she told me why we weren’t going all the way to the town we were expecting to go to.
Jenny’s biggest tip, if you find yourself in this situation? Not to talk yourself out of it, not to kick and bit. But to pick your nose and fart as much as you can. That pretty much always puts them off, apparently. And I have to admit to using it myself, when I started getting a funny feeling about a guy who was regularly giving me lift after work (I was working on an employment training scheme where I was paid £10 on top of normal income support; we got travel expenses and, since there were no buses in the school holidays I got taxi fare and didn’t have to put in receipts because taxi drivers didn’t give receipts in those days – I got £5 a day for taxi fare, which was £25 a week at a time when I was receiving £40 a week – I used the money to pay for a driving lesson a week, which I would never have been able to afford otherwise, and the driving instructor picked me up from Stroud and dropped me in Bisley, so I only had to hitch four days a week). Anyway, every Friday afternoon this same guy would stop and pick me up and at first he just chatted pleasantly. But after a few weeks he would give me some quite creepy looks and his hand slipped off the gear stick a few too many times, so I remembered Jenny’s tips and started picking my nose and managed to fart loudly a couple of times and he stopped picking me up. (Of course, it could be a coincidence, but I like to think it was Jenny’s self-defence tips!)
Jenny the climber
When Jenny was a child, she loved climbing. She climbed trees, climbed derelict building sites, climbed buildings and even climbed onto their roof. Apparently, one time she managed to fall through a greenhouse or conservatory roof, but I can’t remember the exact details. When I was little we would go to the park (the ‘rec’) a lot and she would climb the climbing frame and swing on the swings and climb some of those trees, too – joining in as much as, if not more than, me. When we lived in Spain, we had to climb five flights of stairs to our apartment on the top floor, multiple times a day. She also still happily climbed up the climbing frames in parks and swung on the swings. One night, after we’d been out to a bar for most of the night and were walking home, she decided to climb up onto the edge of a bridge we were crossing and walk along it. I’m pretty sure she was very drunk and absolutely no concept of the extreme danger (there wasn’t actually any water in the riverbed in Valencia, as the river had been redirected some time before – all there was at the time was a small trickle of sewage that ran along the middle of the river bed, so a fall would have been fatal) – not to mention her ten-year-old daughter walking beside her and desperately wanting her to climb down. But, in all honestly, it wouldn’t have been entirely out of character for her to climb up and walk along it without a drop of alcohol (though it would have been a tad less scary to me).
#nofilter Jenny
I feel like this is something that came with age, but there’s a really strong chance that it was more that I didn’t notice it when I was a kid. Because your mum (or your Mama or your Jenny as she was to me, and to Eva – never Mum or Mummy) is always your mum and just is, I suppose. It’s only once others’ opinions and perceptions start becoming more important – and noticeable – that you start to realise that maybe this isn’t other people’s normal. (And, of course, there is the question of ‘What, actually, is normal?’ and it’s quite possibly that the quirks and idiosyncrasies of our mother are not much weirder than those of plenty of other mothers.)
In fact, there were conversations I had with Jenny, when I was a child – mostly during those home-ed years and in Spain (which was a kind of mélange of school and home-ed, with me attending a school, but doing my own work with my own books during a lot of the classes, but integrating socially and learning to speak pretty fluent Spanish) – which, as someone bringing up daughters now seem both really ‘with it’ and important discussions and, at the same time, a little bit too far, perhaps. Mostly these revolved around bodily functions of various kinds.
The #nofilter Jenny I’m thinking of, though, is more the one who appeared in later years – or perhaps the one who affected me more in later years. The Jenny who would talk very loudly about her latest bowel movements on the bus. The Jenny who decided to talk about her sex life with my dad at his wake. The Jenny who thought it wise to loudly state something about it being time to understand that men only want you for your vaginas (she may not have used that word!) at her granddaughter’s 10th (I think) birthday celebration.
This Jenny made me cringe time and time again. I could see the social lines she overstepped, even when I couldn’t see my own (for I am carved from the same stone, albeit with a little extra polish and slabs of paint). But, at the same time, I envied the freeness with which she could throw these statements and questions out there. She didn’t have a full concept of social norms and behaviours – or she didn’t give a damn about them, perhaps. The ability to switch off caring about what others think sounds almost like a superpower to me. (Of course, it’s quite possible that she spent every second agonising about what people thought and still was not able to get it remotely right. If so, I’d like to return that inheritance, please.)
Jenny and food (and addictive personality)
Jenny had some kind of sense disconnect when it came to food. She told me on a number of occasions that she never really got enjoyment from food like she could see others doing. Though she did often express pleasure at food I’d cooked (maybe she did get more of the social nuances than I thought!).
She could, however, be quite obsessive about food. She was quite amenable to special diets (or food fads, depending on your perspective!) and credits both mine and Eva’s births to a special diet (macrobiotic for me and raw food diet for Eva). She would find a dish that she liked (or, possibly, that fulfilled all the nutritional criteria she wanted it to) and would eat it again and again. And she was a creature of habit, too – I wrote my A Level language coursework about addictive personalities (I basically wrote the same thing for French and German and translated them!) and they were largely based on Jenny and her various obsessions. Peanut butter on toast was her breakfast for not quite as long as I can remember, but possibly as long as Eva can. But she couldn’t eat it until about 10 or 11 am and it tended to merge with lunch, though not always. In later years, she needed to have it drizzled with linseed oil and it was a mixture of different nuts, not just peanuts. But it was always on a wholemeal granary (or malted) toast and had butter (or spreadable Lurpak) underneath it.
When I ran off to rescue her in Jamaica last January (she had a severe hypomanic episode) and ended up staying with her and accompanying her back, rather than persuading her to come home early, she had a need to eat a sandwich with cream cheese and beansprouts (and often needed to add plantain chips and sliced tomatoes as well), and then pour mango juice on it and weigh the whole thing down with a heavy plate for an hour or two, before eating it. That was definitely an extreme example of food obsession – however, it was all routed in nutritional needs. Since she didn’t really get enjoyment out of the food, a lot of the time, it was more about making sure that a meal could provide a specific range of nutrients (which you can see that the bizarre sandwich in Jamaica did).
In her later years, living in her first very own home (what an amazing feeling that was for her –first time she got to make all the decorating decisions, first time she could completely decide where everything went, first time where she could pick the colours and explore charity shops and the like to fill it with things she liked) she would make something that would then turn into the bulk of the week’s meals. After her wonderful trip to India, this was predominantly a (vegetable) curry of some kind, but sometimes it might be a more Mediterranean sauce. Sometimes she would have a naan bread last three days and sometimes she would heat up a vegetable pasty and have it alongside the curry or sauce. Or some vegetables and potatoes on the side. I remember going round there to stay for a couple of days when she’d been in hospital and was staying away from dairy (though not completely vegan) – she had some tortellini, which she would eat with roasted vegetables and top with hummus (actually very nice).
Actually, for someone who stated she didn’t ever find enjoyment in food, she would go to a lot of trouble with it! Oh, and she would take forever to cook a meal in later years, which I found very frustrating. She always thought it would take about half an hour, and it would take at least an hour, often two!
She did teach me some great recipes, when I was younger, though. Mama’s cauliflower cheese was the best (as were Papa’s Sunday quiches). I also really loved the pancake ‘cake’ she made, which I feel strongly I would hate now (but I have my own very tasty pancake lasagne that I make, which must, in some way, be inspired by hers). There were layers of pancakes, interspersed with Campbells Condensed Asparagus soup, tinned asparagus and tinned spinach. All topped with a breadcrumb and cheese crust (which was the same as the topping on the cauliflower cheese). I loved that soooo much that I made it for my first boyfriend in college (I can’t remember the last time I saw any of those tins, except maybe asparagus) and he was not impressed. Pretty sure I made it once for Chris, too, and he also was unimpressed. I bet Jack Monroe would love it!
Soundtrack to corona lockdown
There is lots of newness (and a fair bit of the same) about this corona lockdown – which I’m almost 5 weeks into and the rest of the family (and much of the country) is just over 4 weeks into. I have always loved being up at the same time as the birds and drinking my morning cuppa or doing my morning yoga while they serenade me (because, obviously, they are singing only to me and not for themselves or the rest of the street). And walking my daughter home from roller-skating through the park and the early evening cacophony that would give BTS* a run for their money can be breathtaking and awe-inducing.
On Friday, though, as I went on my third expedition to the local Co-op to forage for milk (only two-pinters of red milk available), aubergines (none), bread (almost the last two loaves on the shelves – one brown and one white because we hate white and the kids hate brown and and I felt immediately guilty at taken two, but still didn’t put one back) a taco kit (no problem), coffee (not our usual jar, but still Fairtrade, so yay) and Friday treats (crisps, chocolate, sweets… and, of course beer, Prosecco and Jim Beam), all I could hear during the whole walk was birdsong. Really loud birdsong. Beautiful, calming birdsong.
What I’m not entirely sure of is whether this level of birdsong has always been there throughout the day and it’s only noticeable in the early morning because of the lack of traffic (and on those evening walks through Stratford Park because, while it’s technically in a town, it’s still a big park, away from traffic). Or whether the birds are hanging around and chatting a lot more, because of the lack of traffic and the lack of people.
Whichever it is… I bloody love this soundtrack to my particular corona lockdown.
* To the uninitiated in everything Korean (or just in the modern pop scene) BTS = Bangtan Boys = massively, humungously, astoundingly huge Korean boy band who dance amazingly, sing pretty good and funky tunes and also now and then give speeches to the UN.
Word for 2020; Word for the Twenty Twenties
I am very excited that it’s the start of a new decade, so I get to pick a word for the year and a word for the decade. I am also stupidly happy for a decade with a proper name – the last two never really found themselves!
Word for 2020
So, for 2020 (I really love saying that – Twenty Twenty, 2020, 20:20…) I have chosen REACH as my word. As usual I have sought out a word that can apply to my life in a variety of ways. I am looking at:
- reaching for the stars – aiming high in those endeavours I want to aim high in (not doing so for every tiny thing, because that’s how you overextend yourself; or how I do, at least)
- reaching out to people – to those closest to me (talking, listening, loving and just being there), but also to people I don’t know so well (to those in need, but also to people who I may have dismissed in the past – so, listening to opinions that might jar with my own, hearing ideas and thoughts and desires that might be outside my experience)
- reaching out into the world – by travelling and exploring, both physically and mentally (I already have two srprs.me trips booked in the next two months, one solo and one with my youngest daughter, and I intend to squeeze more trips in through the year; and I want to keep feeding my brain by reading more and more novels, especially, but probably not exclusively, ones that show me worlds and lives I have not lived).
There are almost certainly some more applications of REACHING that I will stumble upon in the coming months and either embrace or set aside, but these are the main ones I feel I would like to focus on.
Word for the Twenty Twenties
And for the decade? My word is VOICE. And I can really see the potential in this next decade for:
- finding my voice – as an artist, a writer and a woman
- using my voice – to speak out, to be heard, to speak for others who can’t, to ROAR (it’s the Roaring Twenties, right?)
- voicing my opinions and concerns – just before the last decade started, I was blogging a lot and that me an output for my voice; during this last decade I did things like join political parties and committees and governing bodies where I had a voice; this decade, I don’t yet know exactly how my voice will get out there, but I feel it’s likely to include art, writing of some kind and, probably most important for me currently, learning to speak up within my immediate and extended family and with friends (which might sound like a doddle, but seems to be the hardest of all for me).
So, there we have it, my words for 2020 and for the Twenty Twenties. Tomorrow, I will diving into the traditional January 30-day yoga ritual (Yoga with Adriene – Home), which will be reaching in a very physical way. I’m also starting on a Year of Art School with Make Art That Sells, where I will be reaching in my artistic skills and knowledge, as well as doing some voice finding. At the end of the month I have my first trip of the year – excited to find out where I will go this time (so far, I have been to Malaga (in 2018), Bratislava and Krakow (both in autumn last year) on my srprs.me trips – I also went to Jamaica, Mexico and Korea last year, so I have quite a bit to live up to this year!) – and will be reaching out to the world there.
Happy New Decade to you all
Do you have a word for the year and/or the decade? I’d really love to hear them, if so.
What I want for my kids by the time they leave home
Some of this will be covered at school, some will need to be covered by us and some, realistically, they probably won’t know when they leave home (some of it I’m still working on at 46). But it’s what I’d really like to help provide them with by the time they leave home.
- I want them to be able to survive and thrive in the way they want to, in the world as it is when they venture out into it.
- I want them to have the tools to live in, to thrive in and to be happy in, the society in which they find themselves.
- I want them to know that they can go really far – whether that’s travelling the world (or indeed the galaxy), being Prime Minister, winning a bunch of Oscars, being a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, heading up a global charity, writing and/or illustrating a bunch of bestselling books, heading a team of scientists who save the world, or cure a big disease… or one of the many careers or areas of life that will exist in 10 or 20 years that we have no inkling of.
- I want them to know, as well, that they can have a happy, satisfying and full life if they choose different directions – whether that means working to provide the money to pursue an interest or diverse interests, rather than careers being their main interest. I want them to know that a calm and small-scale life where they smile and laugh every day, care about those around them and do no (or minimal) harm to others, is as valid a direction to take as getting to the top of a particular career, but that they have it within the powers to do either and should not let self-doubt or the doubts of others put them off.
- I want them to know that they can pick one career and direction and change their mind ten years later, twenty years later, or even thirty years later. I want them to understand that the world of work has changed significantly in the last few decades and will continue to change and want them to be ready to give and to take within that new world of work, and still be comfortable and happy.
- The skills and knowledge I want them to develop to survive and thrive (thriving, to me, meaning being comfortable, satisfied and happy most of the time – how they measure their comfort, satisfaction and happiness will be entirely down to them) include:
- self-awareness
- self-esteem
- positive body image
- understanding of how they learn best
- understanding of what makes their hearts sing
- self-determination
- ability to make decisions for themselves
- ability to own their choices
- ability to not let others dictate their whole lives
- understanding of how to follow the rules, but the confidence to question them when they need questioning
- communication
- awareness of social cues and social expectations
- ability to show and tell people how they feel
- ability to debate and argue without putting other people down
- ability to communicate well in writing
- ability to speak other languages, at least to some extent
- ability to actively listen
- ability to reflect back and show people they have understood
- confidence to speak up in situations where they need to, whether that’s telling someone in a shop that they’ve been short-changed, sharing their beliefs or opinions, or giving a speech in the United Nations – or the plethora of situations in between
- understanding that we write and speak differently with different people (including an understanding of swearing and when to and not to use it)
- empathy
- understanding that their way is not always the only way, or even the right way
- ability to appreciate others’ feelings and offer comfort and support where they can
- ability and desire to not act in a way that will upset or harm others (but the reasoning and self-awareness to understand that we can’t always put others before ourselves)
- problem solving
- ability to see when there is a problem and to work through the steps needed to solve it
- ability to ask for help when they need it
- awareness and understanding of where to go for help or knowledge
- desire to solve their own problems and, within reason, help others to solve theirs (with an openness to think about how bigger problems could be solved and offer/do what they can to do so)
- money understanding and management
- understanding of how much things cost (everyday items, as well as bigger things), in relation to how much people earn
- understanding that different people earn different amounts
- understanding of how to plan and save for big purchases
- understanding of value of money – appreciation of when something might be considered a waste of money (cf. empathy – different people will have different ideas of what is a waste of money)
- understanding of benefit system and where to go for financial help if needed
- understanding of cost of university education and different options
- understanding of differences between renting and buying in terms of housing (including difference between social and private rentals)
- understanding of banking system and what options are available (at different ages and stages)
- understanding of taxes (personal and business and what they pay for)
- nutritional understanding and cooking skills
- understanding of current thinking of what a balanced diet is (and that there are always new studies that may lead to changes in advice)
- understanding of which nutrients are essential and which are advisable for health
- understanding of how food affects health and fitness
- understanding of why we need more of some foods and less of others
- ability to prepare a range of basic meals and snacks
- awareness of how to find out how to cook something new
- ability to undertake basic kitchen tasks (cutting, grating, peeling, boiling, frying, baking, grilling)
- basic understanding of kitchen safety (e.g. handling hot pans and dishes, cutting safely)
- basic understanding of kitchen hygiene (e.g. washing hands, washing dishes, keeping surfaces clean, keeping fridges clean, how to store different foods)
- hygiene (personal and household) skills and knowledge
- understanding of basic personal hygiene tasks that are needed and how often (e.g. brushing teeth, hair, washing hair – including different options of shampoo, no shampoo, etc. – cleaning sweaty areas daily, how often to bathe/shower and different options in terms of soap, etc. and whether and when to use deodorant)
- awareness of why personal hygiene is important (e.g. personal health, how it affects others, preventing disease)
- awareness of period hygiene (e.g. what options are available now and reasons to use different options, importance of disposing of sanitary towels/tampons in the right way and/or ways to clean menstrual cups or period pants hygienically)
- awareness of hygiene and cleanliness needs (and cf. empathy – while there are some concrete facts, a lot of levels of hygiene and tidiness and cleanliness are down to personal preference and sometimes specific physical needs; when we share our spaces with others, whether family, friends, housemates or strangers, we need to take them into consideration ) – e.g. in relation to disease, germs, allergies
- health and fitness
- ability to stay healthy and fit (nutrition, exercise, environment, overall activity levels)
- understanding of common illnesses and what can be done to prevent or manage them
- understanding of less common illnesses and what can be done to look out for them and/or spot them early
- awareness of NHS and what is available free and what you have to pay for (and when – e.g. prescriptions, glasses and dental treatment free for children); understanding of how healthcare works in some other countries and benefits of different systems; how the NHS has changed over the years
- organisational skills (including physical organisation, planning and time management)
- ability to plan learning and revision
- ability to organise space – small spaces, such as suitcases and individual drawers or shelves, and larger spaces, such as rooms, or even houses
- ability to break down goals and plans into smaller tasks and sort plans into short-term, medium-term and long-term
- ability to consider others in planning and organisation
- learning skills
- cf. self-awareness
- ability to learn in different ways, and awareness of best ways for them
- openness and willingness to learn new things (skills and knowledge)
- specific skills, such as research, note-taking, skim-reading, how to use the internet for learning, how to use books for learning, ability to teach others
- cultural awareness
- willingness to absorb popular and classical culture (e.g. through books, film, music, etc.)
- willingness to learn about, understand and appreciate other cultures
- understanding of different religions and non-religions, both in terms of what they teach, but also why people follow them (and a willingness to let others follow their own beliefs, unhindered – as long as they do not harm others and prevent others from following their own beliefs)
- awareness and understanding of other belief systems that are not tied to religion (e.g. vegetarianism and veganism, humanism)
- love of reading (please) and an awareness of how much power, joy and knowledge reading can provide (this relates to learning, self-awareness and other areas, too)
- historical, political and social awareness
- strong knowledge and awareness of history, to guide actions and beliefs (and to help protect themselves and their generation and children’s generation from making the same mistakes that were made again and again already)
- an awareness of how equality and inclusion have increased in the last hundred years and how far it still needs to go (race, gender, social class, physical ability)
- an awareness of different political leanings, along with the parties that (currently) espouse the leanings and what policies tend to go with those leanings
- an interest in politics, at the very least, on the level of voting, but ideally in terms of understanding what is happening around them and how they can impact that (how voting and membership of a party are not the only ways to engage and partake in politics)
- an awareness of social welfare and what is available to people here and around the world (and an understanding of why these are needed – and possibly an awareness of viewpoints that don’t embrace social welfare)
- relationships and sex
- ability to make friends
- ability to maintain friendships
- awareness that friendships don’t have to last forever
- cf. empathy
- awareness of differences between friendship and closer relationships (whether or not they are sexual)
- awareness of love and different types of love
- awareness of what sex is and why people have it
- awareness of consent
- awareness of sexual abuse of different levels, as well as discrimination
- awareness of sexuality (and gender – and how they can differ) – including self-awareness in these terms
What I want from my kids now and going forward
- To know that I love them and always will.
- To know that I am proud of them.
- To know that I think they are amazing and become more and more amazing every day.
- To know that I trust them to make good decisions.
- To know that I am here to:
- listen
- hug
- help
- advise
- teach
- guide
- hang out
- comfort
- feed
- provide shelter
- comb nits out
- share my world view
- share my opinions
- share my experience.
- To trust me enough to come to me with any problems, fears and sadness.
- To understand that they have responsibilities (which will differ depending on their age and stage of learning and development and outside responsibilities) and to carry these out without (much) complaint.
- To think about how their actions and behaviours affect those around them (their immediate family, wider family, friends, teachers, and people out and about) and to adjust their actions and behaviours, where they can easily do so, to avoid and prevent harm and hurt to others.
- To do any homework they have, to the best of their abilities and within their powers and to ask for help/advice from us if and when they need it.
- To listen to the answer when they ask someone a question.
- To be open to learning about new things, hearing new music, watching new films, reading new books, eating new foods. BUT to also understand that don’t have to always be open to these things, e.g. when not in the right mood, when they had already planned something else, etc. – as long as they do not always refuse.
- To acknowledge other people’s interests and passions, even when they differ from their own.
- To NEVER call someone ‘stupid’ – help people to understand, if they don’t and are willing to understand. Remember that what may seem stupid to them, may make absolute sense to the other person.
- To reserve HATRED for absolute evil (e.g. hate murder, racism, rape; don’t hate your sister for sitting on the sofa you want to sit on, or your parent for asking you to pick up your shoes).
- To be honest about their feelings, as far as they can, but while thinking of others’ feelings (e.g. if they really don’t like a meal, be honest about it, but not rude; saying what it is about it they don’t like, if they know what changes would make it OK, etc.)
- To know that their feelings, all of them, are equally valid and allowed. BUT… to think about how they express their feelings, especially ANGER or HATRED, but also LOVE.
- To know that some people like hugs and kisses and high fives and others don’t. If anyone doesn’t want a hug or a kiss or a touch of any kind, they have the right to say so. ‘My body, my choice.’ (Including them!)
- To understand that people need different levels of personal space. Some people find eye contact uncomfortable, some people don’t like people very close to them, some people need to spend a percentage of the day (or some days) on their own, others need to spend lots of time in the company of other people. Respect others’ needs and express their own; sometimes they may not mesh, and a compromise may be needed.
- To find their own ways to calm down when they are angry or frustrated and use these – thinking of others in doing so (e.g. say ‘I need to leave the room to calm down’ instead of storming out; hold up a finger to show you know the other person is there, before closing your eyes and breathing in and out; say ‘I know you’re upset too. I can’t talk about it right now, but I will talk to you when we are both calmer’, etc.). (Ask for tips and advice and ideas if they don’t have their own ways yet. Be open to ideas, but accept that what works for one person may not work for another.)
- To follow the rules at home and at school, BUT… to question these rules within the structures available, where they feel they are unfair – follow the rules first, question later, unless following the rule will cause immediate and obvious harm to someone (that doesn’t include harm of the kind of ‘If I follow this rule I won’t get to watch everything I want,’ or ‘If I follow this rule I won’t get as many sweets as I want’). And be aware of times in history when rules had to be broken in stronger ways (e.g. suffragettes, fighting apartheid and slavery, etc.), and that it is not impossible that a time will come in their lifetime when it needs to happen again.
- To understand that rules within our family, within their schools, and within other institutions and societies, have evolved and been discussed over time and are based on personal experience, history and scientific evidence. Rules do not usually come about arbitrarily and on a whim. BUT… sometimes rules have been here too long and have not kept up with other changes in society; sometimes scientific research has shown that the original information the rules were based on is now proven to be wrong; sometimes the rules were always wrong, but it took time for everyone to see it.
- To understand that there are times to break rules, but this should not ever be done on a whim, but for well-thought-out and solid reasons.
What I don’t want for or from my kids
- I don’t want to tell them how or what to feel.
- I don’t want them to live the life (or lives) that I feel I missed out on.
- I don’t want them to follow in my footsteps and do exactly what I do (unless they want to).
- I don’t want to tell them what to believe.
- I don’t want them to fear me.
- I don’t want them to love me without question.
- I don’t want them to respect me without question.
- I don’t want them to hide the big stuff from me.
- I don’t want them to go hungry.
- I don’t want them to be lonely.
- I don’t want them to be homeless (if they choose to travel for long periods they would always have a home to come back to here – or wherever).
- I don’t want them to not care about anyone other than themselves.
- I don’t want them to be wilfully ignorant.
- I don’t want them to feel lost.
- I don’t want them to feel hopeless.
Word for 2018 | Listen
Rather than New Year’s Resolutions, which always (in my experience, at least) tend to fall over within a week or two, I’ve spent a few years picking a word for the year (along with a gazillion other people – it’s not something I came up with all by myself). Last year’s word was ‘Inspire’, 2016’s was probably ‘Mindfulness’ or possibly ‘Serenity’, though I don’t seem to have written out down anywhere, 2015’s was ‘Success’ and, according to Facebook’s ‘On this day’ thingy, 2014’s was ‘Serenity’.
I’m never quite sure how well this word of the year thing works, but it feels more positive and motivational than a big lists of things to give up, so I still like doing it. Along with getting a gazillion (yes, I like that word, what?) diaries and journals, usually only one of which gets used beyond January (the day to a page one that sits on my desk and gets my daily/weekly (mostly work) planning written in). Maybe this year will be different, because I also bought myself a fountain pen so I can write beautifully in the beautiful diaries I bought. Hmm…
I’ve been finishing off the year working, which isn’t what I’d choose to do, really, though I’m reminding myself that I had a leisurely couple of months at the start of the academic year, including two trips abroad, which makes doing a bit of work in the holidays really quite bearable. But we also have family visiting and so will be seeing in the New Year this evening with a lovely meal and family games and/or films and children trying to stay awake until midnight, which will be wonderful and a perfect way to celebrate.
I have a few plans for this year, but they will stay in my head (or journals), so that I don’t jinx them.
My word for 2018 is going to be ‘Listen’ (which you probably guessed from the picture up there). This, I feel encompasses a whole lot of different kinds of listening, both physical, emotional and metaphorical, but it is definitely inspired by a desire to do a lot better at listening to my children and family. Part of this will involve putting the phone away more (I have a new phone and have lapsed back into bad social-media-checking habits since my refreshing detox in November) so that I can concentrate on people in the room, as opposed to people all round the world. But I also need to remember (or learn – maybe I’ve never done it) how to store the things that I listen to so that they are still there the next day or the next week, or the next year. I tend to store away things that I see (colours and images the most, I think, these days, at least) or read much more easily than things I hear. Which leads to me forgetting what people say to me.
So I will aim, this coming year, to:
- listen to my family
- listen to my friends
- listen to music
- listen to birds
- listen to silence
- listen to curiosity
- listen to inspiration
- listen to characters
- listen to ideas
- listen to beliefs
- listen to opinions
- listen to evidence
- listen to possibilities
- listen to water
- listen to breath.
And just listen in general.
I’d love to hear about your Word for the Year, or resolutions, plans or intentions if you do that kind of thing.
Escaping the social media bubble
I’m at the end of a voluntary (and now I’m thinking I totally could have done something extra with it like got people to sponsor me in a whole Sober October kind of way) Facebook break. I decided on an arbitrary amount of time that I thought would be enough to give me more insight into my Facebook habits and also help break some of them. So it was for ‘at least two weeks’ and it’s done now.
How has it been? Remarkably similar to giving up any other substance you’re addicted to, to be honest (or, indeed, like a detox and this kind of break has been described as a digital detox). The first couple of days I was quite jumpy and reaching for my phone or opening up Edge on my desktop, almost certainly with the subconscious intent of hitting Facebook. And now, almost two weeks in, I’m finding I miss the habit of it (just like I missed the habit of smoking for a few weeks after the nicotine had left my body) more than the actuality of it.
Mostly, the habit that is still niggling, is the having a moment to wait for something – a pause in work, a kettle to boil, the school bell to ring… I’m doing it less, but I am still automatically reaching for my phone (or the browser icon on the computer) quite a bit. That seems to be one of the things that smartphones and social media has brought – a need to fill every moment with something, and the fear that not doing so will somehow make us inefficient or unproductive or whatever. But I think those empty moments are really important for mental health and maybe even physical health (no, I don’t have facts and statistics to back this up, this is just me mulling over my personal experiences). At first, I started just replacing Facebook with something else digital and online (looking at the headlines, scrolling through Instagram or Pinterest, trying to find other news or commentary sites to read when I’d read everything on The Guardian (OK, probably not everything, because I rarely click through past the front page)… But I’ve gradually started reaching for a magazine (I have three subscriptions now and I’m behind in reading some of them – I did, just, manage to finish the previous issue of Flow the morning before the new issue arrived, but I have two The Simple Things to finish and the new one just turned up (beautiful cover!) and I have one and a half issues of Breathe to catch up on, too) or a book, instead. Or, I have a couple of mini sketchbooks that sit in my bag and a few pens, so I can doodle or draw when I’m out and about. When I’ve been at my desk, and found myself at a point where my fingers are itching to open up Edge and look at something online I’ve instead put my hands together, taken a few deep breaths (yoga practice coming out, there), and gone back to work. Guess what? Actually more productive and efficient that way, rather than taking ‘breaks’ to scroll through page after page of social media statuses (and adverts). Who’d have thought it?
I’m finding there’s really not much I’m missing by staying off Facebook. I don’t feel I’m going to shut down my account or anything that drastic. But, I think I’ll mostly stay off it. I popped on briefly today and there were a crazy number of notifications, almost none of which were actually of interest, but which would normally have grabbed me away from something else immediately they appeared – things like Friend X commented on the same post as you in Group C, Person B posted in Group Y, etc. etc. So, next time I look in, I will be turning off all of those kinds of notifications. I will look at the groups I’m in and remove myself from some and keep others, but just look at them maybe once a week or a fortnight to see what’s been happening. Usually, there are one or two interesting posts that have a bunch of comments on and that I end up being drawn into every time someone comments. Reading them when people are mostly done commenting will be easier and just as useful as seeing it all ‘in the moment’. I had a brief scroll through my own timeline (my Instagram posts have been automatically posting to Facebook, so not everyone will have realised I wasn’t actually there) and saw that there were some likes and a few comments on the Instagram pictures (mostly daily practice paintings) and I appreciated this, without needing to have seen those likes and comments the second they were posted.
Next thing I’m going to need to deal with is cutting down on looking at Instagram – the same thing applies, that they will still be there if I see them all at once at the end of the day, or in the morning, rather than checking in multiple times to see how many extra likes I’ve got on the latest picture I posted. Though, I actually feel I’ve been cutting down there, too, as a natural adjunct to the Facebook break. It started with probably spending more time on there (and Linked-in, for some reason), but the recognition and self-realisation I’ve come to about Facebook is clearly also relevant to Instagram and others, and my urge to reach for the phone has reduced, which has naturally lead to less Instagram scrolling.
I use Instagram almost entirely for art-based interaction and inspiration. I have got work through pictures people have seen on my Instagram. I love seeing work by others and giving back in some way, by commenting on and liking others’ work (I don’t like and comment on every single picture in my feed, just the ones that really jump out to me). So, I’m not going to give that up. BUT… One of the elements of self-recognition is to understand that Instagram and Pinterest as inspiration are kind of hollow versions of true inspiration and they are their own kind of bubble. They can both lead to the ‘I’m not good enough’ trap that most artists fall into regularly. When you expose yourself to thousands of pieces of art a day, much of it by people at an entirely higher level and far further on in their art career than you, the ‘inspiration’ can lead both to inadvertent copying (one of those images that flashed past you today, may be the source of that awesome idea you have a couple of days down the road, without you realising it), to a feeling that you will never be that good, and to an inability to settle on your own style or preferred method or media. Experimenting with new materials and ways of working is a really important thing to do to grow as an artist, but if you want to do so on a daily basis because of that awesome art that Artist C has been posting this month, or the amazing range of work you’ve seen on Hashtag Q, you’re in serious danger of losing your own focus.
So, I need to come up with a more defined way to cut back on Instagram, without losing it entirely (at least for the moment). There is this idea that there’s lots of work to be got through Instagram and Pinterest, but actually, while there are artists who do get clients and commissions a plenty through social media, many don’t. If I spent half the time I do on Instagram researching and contacting potential clients it’s quite possible that this would be a much more productive and lucrative use of my time. And, obviously, there’s also the whole making art rather than looking at art. The less time we spend scrolling and liking and pinning and tweeting, the more time we have to paint, draw, ink, scribble…
The other thing I think I’ll probably do is remove all the news and political sites from my Facebook feed. I don’t really feel any worse off having got my news direct from the news sites and the ones I haven’t seen in my feed (either through their own Facebook page or through friends sharing them) I don’t feel the loss of. I haven’t really done it yet, but I feel like I may be more likely to get back into writing blog posts about issues that concern me in the news or in politics (or just in general), rather than typing a brief(ish) Facebook status, or a mini rant when hitting ‘Share’ on an article. I kind of feel as though Facebook sucked the writing out of me. Because there were more people who would read and (more ‘importantly’) interact with a post on Facebook than an actual blog post, it became easier to engage with people through Facebook than my blog. (Facebook probably didn’t help this, by mostly not showing people links to blog posts!)
But… while interaction and readers are great, they are not what I ever really blogged for. If you’re new here, you might not know that I was a ‘parent blogger’ – I refuse to call myself a ‘mummy blogger’, sorry – over at www.wahm-bam.org – and got to the point where I was making money from it and getting lots of ‘stuff’ to review. When I started blogging it was purely for the act of writing and to get stuff out of my head and onto a page, which was a really useful and mental-health-friendly thing to do. It was also a good way to share pictures and information about the girls with their grandparents and aunts and uncles. I gradually started writing other things, too, some related to parenting, and some not massively (political, philosophical and personal meanderings through my thoughts and opinions and principles). I wrote up recipes and created new ones. I gathered a small group of other (mostly parent) bloggers around me and we ‘hung out’ together, commenting on each other’s blogs, and sometimes met up in person at conferences or small meet-ups. It was like a virtual coffee morning, or sitting on a friend’s sofa for a couple of hours chatting about the world. And I think social media kind of took that and ran with it and somehow turned it into something else entirely. (For me, at least. I think there are still people who probably get that feeling out of social media and don’t get the whole overwhelm thing.)
The writing was always the most enjoyable and fulfilling part, though. And mostly I’ve always been a dump-it-all-out, rambling kind of writer, rather than someone who plans it all out with headings and bullet points (though I can do that, too), so it’s not really about the craft or even creativity, but maybe more about quietening my head. (Painting and drawing quietens my head in a whole other, much more mindful, way, which is equally as useful.)
I’d love to get back to doing more of this kind of writing (the kind that this whole blog post has been, in fact) and Facebook (etc.) is not the place to do that.
Self-portraits and daily practice
After Inktober I felt the need to keep up some kind of more focused daily practice. I do pretty much always draw or paint something every day, whether just doodles or rough sketches, or fully realised pieces for my portfolio or for a client. But the focus and impetus to stick to a daily practice that comes with Inktober is something I always enjoy but rarely seem to stick to at other times of the year.
So, in November I started doing some self-portraits in gouache in a new sketchbook my sister gave me for my birthday at the end of October. They’re extremely stylised and mostly focus (so far, at least) on aspects of my personality or things I enjoy doing. I’m struggling with working out how to include family and friends without taking away from the idea that these are SELF-portraits. I did manage to squeeze the dog in, so I can probably have them in as an element, but not the focus.
This was the first one, which I didn’t finish, but am actually quite happy with in the end. It should have had lots of pattern on the dress, and probably been surrounded in flowers or something.
This is one of my favourites and I spent a lot of time on it (oh, and it has blue dippen in the background, which might help as I do love my dippens!). I like the grey bits in my hair, I’m holding a cup of tea (or maybe it’s coffee) in a pretty mug, wearing one of my red flowery dresses and beaded necklaces and bracelets, and am sitting in front of my art shelves, which I love and sit beside my desk – they are full of art books and my favourite magazines and some houseplants and art supplies and Giffords Circus programmes and other little pretty bits and bobs. I love just sitting and staring at the shelves sometimes. (Should really make the rest of the house feel like that, too!)
This is me doing a cartwheel. Used to do them all the time when I was younger and then I hurt my wrist one winter after slipping on some ice and couldn’t manage them for years (my wrist would just give way every time I tried that are a handstand) and then I had two years of dizzy spells and numbness. And then I started doing yoga (hmm – haven’t done that for ages and really should!) and my dizzy spells have gone (there’s a post that explains the dizzy spell thing more) and in the summer I had a go at doing cartwheels in the park with Eleanor and a friend and actually managed it. I was sooooooo happy!
This is one of my favourite passtimes – cooking with loud music on and dancing around (and, yes, I do often have a glass of Prosecco at the same time, but it turns out I can also do it with a cup of tea). I have a go-to playlist on Spotify for this, which has a lot of dancy oldies, but also some more recent stuff, though will sometimes just pick a singer or band and put them on shuffle play. I can even enjoy cleaning the kitchen if I put loud music on and dance around while doing it!
This one pretty much speaks for itself. I am political and not at all embarrassed to be so. I am generally pretty vocal about my opinions and particularly about the importance of voting and how integral politics is to our lives. To be fair, I don’t go out marching very much anymore, so this more of a representational illustration. My political engagement seems to fluctuate a fair bit – and I definitely need breaks where I just talk or write about politics, rather than go out canvassing and to meetings constantly. I need to find the right level of engagement for me personally, but it is always there and important to me.
Reading. This was unfinished, as well, though I kind of like how it ended up. I was going to give the books titles and/or flowery spines. And I think the book I’m reading was going to be Anne of Green Gables. And the kokeshi dolls on the shelves were going to have faces and patterns. I love reading and getting lost in a book. I struggle to find the time to fit everything I enjoy doing in and think I tend to have phases where I do loads of reading and cut back on something else (I think at the moment I’m probably swapping reading for a lot of going to meetings or going out with friends – sorry). I don’t really have a specific type of book I read. At the moment I’m reading a light contemporary romance, which is page-turny but also makes me feel guilty for its lack of seriousness (which I know is wrong – it’s fine and healthy to get some escapism) and just finished a Joanna Trollope book (used to read loads of her books when I was at uni – her and Mary Wesley – but haven’t for a long time; it was kind of fun and comforting, but also a little discombobulating mostly for class reasons, I think). I recently finished A Place Called Perfect, which was great and thought-provoking and Rosemary’s now reading it and, I hope, enjoying it. I really enjoyed When the Floods Came recently, which I found on the ‘Quick Choice’ shelves at the library. Before that (I think) was Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things, which was brilliant and also very very thought-provoking. I feel like I’m missing some recent reads out – should get back to noting down what I’ve read so I don’t forget!
The last one (so far) is dog walking at night. By the light of the moon. Absolutely love my evening dog walk – it clears the cobwebs away and is good chance for mulling over and digesting what’s happened during the day – or I’ll take the opportunity to phone someone (usually my mum), which can have a similar effect of going over the day.
These are really fun to create, and I’m managing to adjust the time I give to them, according to the time I have available – some days, I might be able to spend a couple of hours and add lots of detail, and others it’s half an hour max and needs to be very quick and loose (that’s harder, somehow, but fun to practice). I’m fascinated at how my hair is changing in the pictures – it’s currently dark brown with wisps of grey and a bit of red brown showing at the ends. Some I’ve drawn with a pencil sketch on the page, some from a pencil sketch in my sketchbook and some just straight on the page. I’m looking forward to continuing these until that particular sketchbook is full.
However, I’ve already struggled with doing them every single day, so bought another sketchbook, in which I’m doing two-page spreads in whatever media I have to hand (and so far, in a limited palette) with a floral on one side and a geometric on the other side. I’m sure I’ve seen a couple of people do this recently, though can’t remember who – sorry! Anyway, it’s a fun idea and let’s me keep drawing florals which are most definitely my ‘go to’ while doing some more geometrics which I enjoy but rarely seem to do. And gives me a doodley and ‘go with the flow’ practice, which I feel I need. I’m picking one or the other at the moment when I come to do my daily art practice. And I’m not minding too much when I miss a day or two – just picking up again and continuing – it’s not a failure, but a little break!
You can follow both my daily practices on Instagram – I’m currently having a Facebook break, which is very refreshing and I think there’s a decent chance I’ll keep that up for longer than my planned two weeks, or at least go back to it with a very different attitude. I might well write a separate introspective post about my Facebook break.
Do you have a daily art practice? Have you tried creating self-portraits and putting your ‘essence’ into them? (I think making one that includes all the important things in your life would be an interesting challenge.) What are your favourite things to do? What are you reading at the moment?
Illustrated recipe: Refried beans
We love tacos and I came up with this homemade refried beans recipe a good few years ago and use it every time we have tacos now. It’s really nice in tacos, served with some shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes and grated cheese and maybe some sour cream, as well (cheese and sour cream totally optional and it would be vegan without them). It’s also great in a tortilla wrap or served with some rice.
I created an illustrated version of the recipe for this week’s Folio Focus theme and have uploaded a long landscape version to They Draw and Cook. I also created three other formats – the above one, a tall one for Pinterest and a square one for Instagram.
Travelling while vegetarian
And here’s Part 4 of my trip review. Part 1 was about holidaying with srprs.me, Part 2Part 2 was about holidaying alone and Part 3Part 3 was all about Malaga. This part is about travelling as a (lifelong) vegetarian.
This was by far the most challenging aspect of the trip and the single thing that concerns me most about doing another similar trip.
My first night, I ended up eating in the hotel bar, because I didn’t feel confident about heading into the centre when it was dark and I hadn’t yet found my bearings (would have been absolutely fine, especially with the help of the trusty maps on my phone, which got me around the city the rest of the time) and the restaurant had just shut.
There was a single vegetarian option on the menu, which was a starter – deep friend camembert with red berry coulis. I asked the waiter if there was anything else vegetarian and he suggested they could do me there speciality salad, but leave out the tuna. So I agreed to have the salad followed by the camembert. And a cold beer (that was very good – and I’m fortunately not too fussy about making sure beer and wine is vegetarian).
The salad was fine and came with a mini bottle of balsamic vinegar and mini bottle of olive oil to drizzle over. And salt. Until, that is, I came across the two pieces of tuna that I hadn’t quite managed to remove from what must have been a ready-prepared salad. I removed them and kept eating, but as soon as I’d seen them the rest of the salad started to taste of tuna. The camembert was lovely, but quite dry.
I missed out on pudding somehow, too. I thought I’d said yes the pudding menu and ordered another beer at the same time. The waiter looked surprised and then brought the beer. Pretty sure I’d said I wanted beer for pudding and to not see the menu. Ah well. I had some sweets in the room left over from the journey.
The next day, after a breakfast (which was absolutely fine and classic hotel breakfast) at the hotel (thank you to srprs.me who added that option in as an unbooked extra) I wandered into the centre. I really wanted a bocadillo de tortilla, which is one of my all-time favourite Spanish ‘meals’. (Spanish omelette, made from onion, potato and egg, in a sandwich.) Couldn’t find any anywhere. I had a waffle at the Picasso museum, along with a (far too strong for me) coffee, while relaxing in a very pleasant and cool courtyard.
The best I could manage, mid-afternoon, was a ‘pincho de tortilla’ with some bread on the side (and a cold beer, of course). It was lovely, but I would have liked more.
Somehow, I didn’t manage to have churros y chocolate (probably my second favourite Spanish ‘meal’) – I think this was because it was just too hot, but am very annoyed with myself that I didn’t.
Dinner the next two nights was a lot better, but took a fair bit of searching. I walked around and around and around the historical centre looking at all the menus and seeing pretty much nothing I could eat. I found an Italian restaurant, though, which is my continental Europe go-to because there are always vegetarian options of pizza or pasta. I had a lovely aubergine, tomato and mozzarella pasta dish (with linguine) and a cold beer. Again, I managed to miss out on pudding, though. I thought I’d asked for the pudding menu (and my Spanish isn’t awful – I lived in Spain for a year as a kid, have a GCSE in it and even ran a Spanish club at our primary school for a term) but the waitress brought me the bill instead. Ah well. I got an ice cream for pudding instead, which was delicious.
The second night, I looked stuff up on the internet before going into town. There were some vegetarian/vegan restaurants but they all sounded a bit too wholesome for me (I’m not an especially healthy vegetarian – I like a lot of carbs and am very very fond of cheese), so I decided to go to an Italian restaurant which looked really good. Except, after walking around the block about five times, I realised that it didn’t exist anymore. Another (posh-looking and with nothing much veggie on the menu) restaurant seemed to have expanded into its space. So I headed back into the historical centre again, determined not to go to the same Italian restaurant again. It was still far too early for dinner, really, but I was looking around trying to find somewhere to go. I spotted a sign that specifically mentioned vegetarian options.
I was determined to go there for dinner, after I’d had a beer and pudding (having done some more reading, it turned out that Spanish people – I have no recollection of this at all – tend to go out for a cake and a little drink in the late afternoon and then eat dinner (and not pudding) later in the evening, around 9 or so. So I had a beer (actually two small beers) while reading my book and watching the world pass by (probably one of my favourite things to do on holiday) and then got an ice cream and tried to find my way back. And failed completely. The street was too small to appear on my phone’s map. I walked around and around and took this turning and that turning and totally couldn’t find it.
So, I ended up back with my default option – an Italian restaurant, though a different one to the night before. Where I had to have Caprese, because it’s Rosemary’s favourite (it was a massive helping though, and I think probably meant to be shared between three or four people). And then I had another pasta, aubergine, tomato and mozzarella dish. Delicious, but I was far too full after my ice cream and two beers. Ah well.
What’s the lesson here? Maybe it’s to just embrace Italian restaurants and accept that those are where you’re going to be able to eat a proper meal without any meat or fish. Or maybe it’s to read up a bit on what traditional local dishes are generally OK and go order them. Or to look up the vegetarian restaurants (because most cities do have one or two) and go eat there, even if it’s too healthy! It’s definitely not to not go, just in case, however. If push comes to shove, you can just go grab some bread and cheese and leave the restaurants alone (in fact, that’s what I ended up doing for lunch on my second day)!
Visiting Malaga
Part 3 of my trip review. Part 1 was about holidaying via srprs.me and Part 2 was about holidaying solo. This one’s all about Malaga, and Part 4 is about travelling as a vegetarian.
Well, that was an eye-opener and a definite benefit of using srprs.me! I would never ever have a booked a holiday to Malaga. Never. It was always associated with the Costa del Sol and all the very worst aspects of Brits abroad. I thought of it as somewhere ‘young people’ (yeah, don’t count myself in that category anymore) go to club and get far too drunk. I thought of it as the place people fly to end up in all those Brit-overflowing sunny resorts. Not somewhere remotely appealing to me.
But, boy, was I wrong. (It’s quite possible all the above is still true, but I didn’t see a single iota of it, except perhaps in the queues for the planes, but even then most everyone I met was lovely – oh yes, apart from the two very well-dressed couples who were very rude, entitled and queue-jumpy; not sure what they were doing flying on a budget airline.)
Malaga is an amazing city!
It has a really beautiful historical area, with all the windy, narrow streets a girl could want (my top thing on any city break is wandering round old, narrow streets).
It has a very impressive beach, with lots of playgrounds and even some grown-up gym equipment alongside it (to be honest, I am not really a beach person, but I do love the sea and walking along next to it was gorgeous.
It has loads and loads of museums and galleries (I only managed to visit a handful of them).
And some beautiful architecture to admire.
It has some gorgeous parks (though I didn’t really find anywhere with patches of grass to sit on – just lots of benches).
It has lots and lots of bars and restaurants (though see my next post if you’re vegetarian).
It has some cool and quirky little shops, as well as a metric tonne of souvenir shops.
It has some quite impressive street art.
Oh, and ice cream. Didn’t take a picture of either of the ice creams I had, but they were delicious.
It’s a reasonably small city, so you can walk it without too much hassle (I walked everywhere, except for getting the bus from the airport and the train back to the airport), though there are buses and it looks like a small metro system, too.
I think it has good potential as somewhere to visit with children – spend the morning on the beach and then go museum or gallery browsing in the afternoon (in the cool of the air-conditioning) and then head into the centre for a pizza or paella or something in the evening. The centre was full of families – and lots of children eating out and hanging out with their family, even as late as 10pm (which is as late as I managed to stay out!).
I would happily go back again and there are some places I missed that I’d particularly like to visit – the Pompidou Centre (yes, related to the one in Paris), the Museum of Culture and Costumes (I think that’s what it was called – I walked passed it at night) and the market. But I’m sure there are lots more places of interest to visit, that I don’t know about.
Holidaying solo
Welcome to Part 2 of my trip review (and sorry it’s taking me so long to write it all up – somehow that vision of being a travel blogger jetting off to all corners (hmm, there aren’t actually any corners on a globe, are there?) of the Earth is fading slightly – probably should have written while I was there!). Part 1 dealt with the experience of travelling with srprs.me.
This may well be down to all the introspection I’ve been doing and the whole trying to work out Who am I? What do I want to be? What do I want to do? What makes me happy? and the answers to many other equally self-obsessed questions. But I really really wanted to go on holiday on my own.
I wanted to travel on my own, without the need to talk to other people all the time, or to worry about children annoying other passengers, or running off where I can’t see them. I wanted to stay in a hotel room on my own (that, I’ve done before a few times, to be fair – at conferences, for work, and one time I even booked myself into a cheap hotel in Cheltenham for a couple of nights in the run up to an Open University exam to get my revision done). I wanted to decide when to leave and how to travel. I wanted to be entirely responsible for everything – where to eat, what museums (if any) to visit, whether to walk or get buses or trains, whether to just sit down at the nearest bar to have a beer, whether to sit and draw or read. What time to go to sleep. What time to wake up… Mostly I didn’t want to have to talk to other people all the time – yes, even my family!
Lots of people (especially other mothers) kept saying how brave I was. And I’m really struggling with this. Would they say Chris was brave if he did it? I honestly don’t think so. So is it brave because I’m a woman? Should I be scared of travelling on my own? What should I be expecting to happen? Or is it brave because I’m a mother? And if so, is it because I’m leaving my children? I don’t get this. I’m leaving them with their father, who spends as much time as me being responsible for them. I’m leaving them during the week when they’ll be at school the majority of the time. Why is it brave to do that, but not for mothers who travel to work every day? Is it just because I’m going to be somewhere they’re not? Am I supposed to worry that something awful is going to happen and I’ll be too far to run back? I don’t think I can survive life if I’m constantly worrying about what awful things are going to happen (and as someone who has suffered from chronic stress and anxiety, I don’t need to add something else in there to worry about, thank you).
What I did feel was brave, though, was recognising that this was something I wanted and needed to do and getting it together and booking the trip. I didn’t think it was especially brave that it took me almost 6 months to do so from the moment I realised I needed to do it. I suppose it was brave to embrace the unknown and leave my destination in the hands of complete strangers, but actually that made it so much easier, so no that probably wasn’t brave. Yes, it is brave to recognise a need in yourself and to go ahead and make it happen. I hope I can manage more of that bravery in the next months and years and, well, really for the rest of my life.
So, how was it actually? Travelling and holidaying alone? Was it absolutely perfect? Was it everything I dreamed of and hoped for?
Probably not, to be honest. Loads of it was, though. I definitely appreciated being in charge of the pace of walking round museums – no-one ever ever wants to go at exactly the same pace as me, and that can be sooooo annoying. I also liked being able to just wander without having to worry about small feet or someone else wanting to do something different. I liked being able to change my mind about what I was doing because I saw a nice park, or an interesting looking gallery.
I missed having someone to talk to, though! All that itching for not having to talk people all the time, but it turns out I do need some interaction and conversation. So that’s an interesting bit of self-knowledge. Fortunately, my phone worked completely normally there, so I did speak to Chris quite a lot. But I would have appreciated having someone to sit down with at dinner time to chat about the different things we’d seen or done during the day. (Yes, this is where I should have got my Surface, or a notebook even, out and written it all down. Lesson for next time, perhaps.)
I didn’t ever feel unsafe or scared, except maybe the very first night when I didn’t feel up to going out to explore and ended up eating (not very well) in the hotel bar. If I’d only walked two minutes down the street, I would have been in a lively area near the station, and a bit further and I’d have been in among loads of people. Apart from that evening, I walked around the city in the day and the night without feeling at all worried or scared, even when I took wrong turnings and ended up walking through quieter areas.
I didn’t ever feel awkward asking for a table for one. I had a book with me and sketchbook (somehow never got the latter out in restaurants – maybe because I was so into the book) and my phone, of course, and would get one of them out as soon as I sat down, but then often look around instead of reading. I didn’t ever feel I shouldn’t be having a beer on my own (only drank beer, not wine, for some reason – actually, probably because it was really really hot).
I did enjoy having the hotel room to myself, though I did also miss cuddles with Chris and the girls. I think I spent too much time in the hotel room, though and should have got up earlier in the mornings and come home later (another lesson for next time).
I feel I need to do this again a few times to truly know whether it’s something I want to do (holidaying solo, I mean) as a regular thing. I feel like there are some things I’d do differently. I think I’d probably speak to other people more (I spoke to some lovely people on the train and in the airport queues). I think I’d know where to head in the airport to feel more comfortable. I think I’d walk taller and carry less stuff when walking round the city. I think I’d have more confidence to just sit down in a bar/restaurant and not wander round loads trying to find the right one. I think I’d get out my sketchbook more and also use the Surface or notebook to record my thoughts and impressions more immediately and regularly.
I think I can also take some lessons from this experience and port them to holidaying with the rest of the family, or friends. For example, making sure I get a bit of solitary time, but also making the most of having people there to talk to and laugh with – and doing so! And lots of cuddles.
The experience wasn’t absolute perfection, but it was enjoyable and rewarding and personality-building. And I will definitely do it again – hopefully in the not too distant future.
Travelling with Srprs.me
I’d decided around Easter time that I wanted to go away for a city break in Europe on my own some time soon. I’d been doing a lot of introspective thinking/searching/pondering, while and after reading Beth Kempton’s Freedom Seeker (highly recommend it, by the way). And I’d realised that I’d never gone on holiday on my own. Not that I’ve been on holiday loads of times, really. I’d travelled on my own, but not for holidays as such, or to meet up with/stay with someone at the other end of the journey. Mostly, in recent years, I’d only been on holiday with Chris and the girls (and, in fact, a few times with Chris’s parents, which has a lot of benefits!).
I’ve always thought of myself as a traveller and a soaker up of other cultures and languages – we lived in Spain for just over a year when I was 10, which was an amazing experience, my mum and I travelled a fair bit in Europe going to Esperanto congresses before that and I did some hitch-hiking round France with my then boyfriend just before starting uni, and then spent a year living in France as part of my degree. I also visited a friend in Madrid a few times and Chris and I honeymooned in Paris and spent a week in Copenhagen. Since the kids, understandably (money, time, complexities of travelling with small children, and the added complication of not driving which makes it more of a hassle to get to airports, and impossible to drive ourselves), we’ve not managed masses of travel, but have done a few week-long trips to France with Chris’s parents (all of which have been brilliant).
Anyway, one of the things that kept coming up when I was reading through Freedom Seeker, was the fact that I felt I missed travel, but especially spontaneous travel, where I just go with the flow, rather than plan everything. (Chris is a planner, so this isn’t the kind of travelling he embraces.) Since I’d not done this kind of travelling in decades, I realised that it might just be a case of searching back into the past for some kind of happiness that I wasn’t getting now and not necessarily something that would still appeal to me, so I needed to try it out, just once.
Only, I couldn’t settle on where to go! I looked at all the cheap flights from Bristol and Birmingham (the easiest airports for me to get to) and then I looked up hotel rooms in some of those cities and I’d settle on one and then read a bit more about it and find a reason to not go there (Perpignan sounded perfect but apparently is a hotbed of the Front National – almost certainly wouldn’t have affected me, but caused me concerns; Greece looked great but was it a positive or a negative thing to be going there as a tourist at the moment – I couldn’t quite be sure; Eastern Europe looked interesting, but would I be able to eat?).
Then I read this article in the Guardian and BAM! I had my answer. You can just pick your dates and say what type of holiday you want (city break or back-packing; hotel or hostel; with a few other small parameters) and they would book it for you. You find out where you’re going at the airport, and just get a weather report a week before and a time to arrive. (You do actually get a package with a scratchcard and an envelope in, the latter of which contains your boarding passes, so you could look before the airport.) I’d booked mine within a few weeks of reading the article. And then had about a month to wait to see where I would go.
I shared with friends and family on Facebook (and in person) that I was doing this and had an overwhelming positive response with many of them seemingly almost as excited as me! A few people didn’t understand my desire to go alone, which I get. It turns out that actually most people haven’t gone on holiday on their own and many thought it was a brave thing (and some a crazy thing) to do, but especially alone into the unknown. Oddly, I didn’t feel especially brave – though I did feel proud at making the decision to do it. It felt like something I really really needed to do, and therefore that negated the bravery element for me.
The weather report came and showed it would be pretty warm (low of 22°C and high of 33°C, and either sunny or cloudy), so I was able to pack very light. I wore one dress and packed another, plus underwear and a nightie (tip – if you’re going somewhere hot, pack twice as much underwear, if you don’t want to be washing it in the hotel sink!) and wore canvas shoes (another tip – sandals would be much better for hot weather) and a cardigan. I took an umbrella in case of rain and didn’t bother with a coat or jacket – which was right, though when I stepped off the plane on the way home I might have appreciated a jacket). I took one book, two small sketchbooks, my pencil case and travel watercolour set. And I took my Surface, as it doesn’t weight too much (probably didn’t need that, but it was handy for doing a bit of writing on, checking into an art class I’m currently doing that I can’t access from my phone, and watching Netflix when I got fed up of dubbed American sitcoms). All in a medium-sized rucksack that would fit in the overhead lockers on the plane and avoid waiting for (and paying extra for) a suitcase.
On the train I chatted to a lady I was sat next to about what I was doing and she also said she thought it was very brave (somewhat a consensus there, so maybe I’ll be persuaded that it was!). I was starting to get more excited, but I wasn’t going to feel it properly until I knew my destination.
I waited until I was at the airport to rub off the scratch card and find out where I was going (and I have to admit to hiding in the loos to do so, which is a bit ridiculous and I won’t do that next time!). When I found out where I was going a laughed out loud. I would never in a million years have booked it myself, though I love the country (I’m not mentioning where it was in this bit, because Srprs.me like to keep the destinations secret, to avoid too much guessing on the part of future travellers – you can scroll down and find out if you really want to). It’s in an area that I associate with the kind of British holidayer (and expat) that I disassociate myself with (the ones who spend lots of time not attempting to speak the language and eating in restaurants run by other Brits so they don’t have to eat the local food, and drinking in pubs run by other Brits, so they can get proper pints and who care mostly about the sun). To be honest I’m almost certainly jumping to far too many negative conclusions there, but that’s why I would never have booked a holiday in that area.
But then I looked it up a bit before I had to go into airplane mode and it looked perfect for me! Lots of museums and art galleries. An amazing historical section with lots and lots of teeny tiny streets (my absolute favourite thing to do in cities is to wander in those kinds of streets). And the sea for an added bonus. Plus, it had the benefit of being somewhere where I’m reasonably comfortable speaking the language (because I hate just going in with English first and acting superior enough to assume that everyone will of course speak English – I had a phrase book my mum leant me with multiple European languages in, and had downloaded the Translator app on my phone, ready to download a language as soon as I knew where I was going (and hoping there would be wifi in the airport), but I didn’t need it.
The flight was somewhat delayed so I didn’t get out of the airport until the early evening. Getting into town was easy enough – walked out of the airport to find a bus going into the city (and made the driver grumpy by giving him a 20 Euro note). My mobile service provider (GiffGaff) has total roaming parity in the EU (hmm, guessing that might not last), so I could use my data, minutes and texts (and calls and texts to Chris and Rosemary are free as they’re on GiffGaff too) and so I used the map app to make sure I was going the right way and manage to get off the bus almost exactly next to my hotel (on a parallel street). (Turns out there was also a train and the train station was about 2 minutes’ walk from the hotel, so I used that on the way back, but it was nice to get the bus in as you see different things that way.)
The hotel was great. It was a very big hotel, with a good sized (double) room and great bathroom, large TV, desk and table. Srprs.me had booked me in for breakfast as a special extra, which I think was probably a good thing, given the issues I had with finding food I could eat. The young lady (who I think was in training) who booked me in had the same name as me and we had a little chat about whether it was an English name, Spanish name or Russian name – it’s clearly a Russian name, but then she thought I spoke Russian, which I don’t. There were no issues whatsoever booking in (Srprs.me had emailed the hotel voucher as soon as I entered my scratchcard code) and everything worked brilliantly. Couldn’t fault it at all.
And now I’m going to leave this for another three blog posts about the whole journey, focusing on different elements – holidaying solo, visiting [the city where I went – Srprs.me like to keep this secret, so don’t read that post if you want to retain this secrecy] and travelling while vegetarian.
Kokeshi Doll Colouring Pages
It struck me the other day that I haven’t created a new downloadable colouring book in absolutely ages. So I’ve put a new one up on Etsy – it’s chock-full of hand-drawn kokeshi dolls for you to colour and includes some fairly blank ones for you to decorate yourself, as well as plenty with lovely floral and geometric patterns that you can let your pencils loose on.
You can buy the Kokeshi Colouring book from my Etsy store …
… but I’ve also made you a sampler that you can download for free, to get a taste for what’s in the book.
I hope you enjoy these – happy colouring!
Inspire in 2017
I don’t think I did a word of the year last year – or, if I did, I didn’t record it. I have a feeling it might well have been ‘Mindfulness’ if I did do it. I spent the year cutting back on lots of extra responsibilities and commitments and concentrating on finding my own strategies for dealing with stress and anxiety, as I recognised in August/September 2015 that my almost two years of dizziness, numbness and other disturbing symptoms had been down to being in an almost constant state of stress.
I was very successful in this and have only had momentary flashes of the big symptoms (dizziness and numbness) over the past year and a quarter. I have a recognisable early symptom (my tummy goes rock hard!) that warns me if I’m starting to feel stress and haven’t realised it and then have a variety of techniques to calm myself.
It’s no longer a case of removing any causes of stress. I was fairly quick to recognise that this is impossible and that, however easy we manage to make our lives, there will always be something that will cause stress or anxiety – perhaps not for everyone to the same degree of course. For example, I swapped stress over getting the reading done for meetings or the anxiety over speaking to strangers for stress about getting the children to school on time and anxiety over talking to people I’ve known for years! So, now it’s more about recognising what is causing the stress and anxiety and either accepting that it is stressful, but will be over soon, or reassuring myself that it’s not something to worry about. When it’s an insurmountable stress or anxiety, I then use the calming and mindfulness techniques – one of the best ones is just stopping and concentrating on breathing; feeling the breaths going in and out, experiencing the smells that come when breathing through the nose, the noises or the silence, and so on.
Other techniques include doing a worry tree – a bit like a spider diagram of everything in your life at the time and offshoots of what you’ve been thinking about a lot there – might be children’s school applications, a political campaign, money issues, work deadlines, etc. etc. Often just writing them all down in a big brain dump makes me feel calmer, but it can also point and one thing that’s particularly worrying me, and then I can think about that and work out how to reduce that worry.
In general, making sure I do some free-flow painting and drawing regularly (ideally daily!) is an amazing help to my overall feeling calm, as is walking the dog, particularly in the evening.
What I’ve been trying to concentrate on more in the last month or so of the year (and I’m still needing to work on it more!) is to reassess my priorities. I have a tendency to put work at the top of all priorities. Deadlines would consume me and would fill my thoughts, even when I wasn’t at my desk. I suffered a constant overwhelming need to always give 100% (in fact, a desire to give 125%!) to clients, because why would they ever come back if I didn’t meet every deadline and never ever make a mistake and always come in under budget, and so on and so on. (And actually that need to give more than perfection is something I’ve had in most areas of life. While a parent governor, I never missed a single meeting and the one time I was late, I agonised about it for a week or more afterwards. Other people on committees or working groups in other areas of my life would cancel at the last minute, not do the actions they’d agreed to, forget to call someone they were supposed to call, but I could never ever let anyone down!) And I wouldn’t be able to give my full attention to other areas of my life, until I had met a particular deadline – even if it was a personal deadline I’d set myself. I wouldn’t listen properly to Chris and the children because my brain was full of whether someone would get some files to me on time to get them out to someone else in time to get them back and not have the project slip…
What I try to do now is to be in the moment as much as possible with whatever I’m doing and not to think about it (whatever it is) at other times. So, work is for the times I’ve sat down to do work and not to worry about while cooking dinner or doing the school run. When I’m talking to or spending time with the children, or with Chris, I try to put my phone away and put my other responsibilities away, too (unless we’re specifically talking about any of them, of course). (Yeah, I’m really rubbish at putting the phone away, but I am getting better!) When I’m out canvasing, that’s what I’m doing and that’s a time to talk and think about politics – I don’t have to spend every waking hour worrying about Brexit or about whether I need to get some campaign leaflets printed, or whether I can manage to attend an interest-sounding meeting.
My priorities at the moment are, in order:
- Family
- Art
- Politics and doing good
- Reading and writing
- Work and finances
The order may well change over time and I might push some things out and add new things. Making sure the top priorities get attention first, doesn’t in any way mean neglecting the others. In fact, I’m finding that it helps me be more efficient and able to concentrate on work, because I know I’ve met or am going to meet my other priorities. I’m still falling over a bit on the work one – and find myself trying to finish something because I really really want it finished that day, and then end up rushing dinner, or skipping a dog walk, or not having to time to paint. I’m doing it less and less, but it’s definitely still a work in progress.
So, whether or not I picked ‘Mindfulness’ for 2016’s word of the year, I think that’s what it was.
This year is ‘Inspire’ and I feel that this relates to all areas of my life and my priorities.
I want to inspire my children and family – to show them how it is possible to enjoy life and to be fulfilled, to show them that learning new skills is worthwhile, to lead by example in getting involved in causes that are close to my heart, to show them that you can succeed if you know what you want and work out how to get it, and in many other ways, too, I’m sure.
I want to inspire people all over the world with beautiful patterns – to give a bit of happiness every day from a splash of colour, of a black and white image they can calmly colour themselves. I want to inspire wonder and curiosity in illustrating for children and understanding and clarity in editorial illustration. I want to inspire people to go out there and show their own art and submit their own art to competitions or to brands.
I want to inspire hope in people who have lost theirs. Hope that we can build a better future for us all. Hope that we can provide food and shelter and education to all, irrespective of their upbringing or personal circumstances. Hope that work will pay. Hope that everyone can have the time and money to spend with their families, or doing what they love. Hope that the daily grind will one day be a small portion of people’s lives and that the rest will be filled with joy and love and wonder.
I want to inspire calm and mindfulness in others, if only by giving an example of how I have found my own, but perhaps in other ways, whether through art or writing or just chatting about it.
I want to continue to inspire confidence and calm in my editorial clients.
Oh yes, and I want to keep finding inspiration myself – in all areas.
So, here’s to 2017, may it shine light into the darkness that marked much of 2016 for the world.
Happy New Year!
Printable Floral Colouring Bookmarks
I have a tendency to just grab a sticky note to mark my page when I’m reading. I have quite a few bookmarks – the ones that come in the books you reserve from the library, a fair few made by my daughters and laminated by (hopefully) willing early years professionals and teaching assistants, some gorgeous ones that came with Uppercase Magazine and some more that came with Flow Magazine… But I almost never remember to use them and still go for the quick and easy (and not terribly aesthetically satisfying) sticky note!
Anyway… I was thinking how cool it would be to make some bookmarks by printing some of my patterns onto card stock and then guillotining them, when Jen, from Mum in the Madhouse suggested the idea of colouring bookmarks. Wow! What a great idea. I made some suitable for all ages, which you can get over at her blog. And then I thought I’d make some more detailed ones for grown-ups (and kids who like more detail, of course!).
So, here you go – I’ve gathered together some florals for a page of bookmarks.
Click the image to download a PDF.
And I couldn’t resist making a start on colouring some in.
Show me your coloured-in bookmarks – you can tag me on Instagram or Twitter or Facebook.
I was wondering about making some printable full-colour bookmarks (and maybe other bits and pieces) to sell in my Etsy store. What do you think? Would you/do you buy that kind of thing to print at home, or do you prefer getting the ready-printed physical copies?
Oh, and if you like these colouring bookmarks, there’s a very good chance you’ll like the colouring cards I illustrated for Cardooo Cards – you can buy them online direct from them and also find them in some WH Smith stores – if you have a shop and are interested in stocking them yourself, you can also contact them about trade deals.
Happy Weekend Free Colouring Page
Lots of people have been coming to this page recently, so I thought I’d give you an extra Happy Weekend colouring page, that I created this week (today being 23 September 2022, a LONG time since the original one below was created). Scroll to the bottom of the page, for the new one. (And you can still download the original one, too!)
I figured it was well past time I gave you a free colouring page, so here’s one for the weekend. Fairly simple one suitable for kids as well as grown-ups, but hopefully will help put you in the mood for having a really good weekend.
Download your PDF of this Happy Weekend Free Colouring Page here.
Brand-new Happy Weekend Colouring Page
And as promised, a brand-new Happy Weekend Colouring Page for you. I’d love to know which one you prefer, as they’re quite different (though both have lots of flowers).
Happy Weekend Colouring Page illustrated by Tasha Goddard illustrated by Tasha Goddard 
Happy colouring or art-making or whatever creativity makes you buzz… and happy weekend!
Christmas Colouring Book (printable) available now
A little later than I’d hoped, but I’ve finished my Christmas colouring book and it’s now available from my Etsy store.
Jam-packed with 25 festive Christmassy designs to keep you calm and colourful through the month. You could even print them out four or more to a page and use them to make Christmas cards or gift tags. Try printing on watercolour paper and colouring with some paints or watercolour pencils – like my daughter did for the robin picture below. Or add some gold to make it sparkle – Christmas is a great time for getting the gold pens out!
Inktober Colouring Book now on Etsy (plus free sample)
My (digital) Inktober Colouring Book is now available on Etsy to buy for £4 (plus VAT, if you’re in the EU). It contains all the drawings I did for this year’s Inktober. Some are more suited for colouring than others, but there’s a good enough variety of complexity, I feel. Flowers, Paisleys, symmetrical patterns, women, and a fabulous regal lion.
And, as always I’m giving you a free sample.
Enjoy, and Happy Colouring!
Free Sugar Skulls Colouring Page
Happy Halloween (or Day of the Dead – sorry, far more scope for pretty colouring!)
Time for a little one-off freebie. And watch this space (or the Etsy store) for a new colouring book coming soon with all of this October’s inktober drawings – some are more colouring friendly than others, but I’ll put them all in, so you can pick and choose.
Happy colouring!
Going with the flow – floral pattern
Part of the new calmer lifestyle I’m trying to adopt, I’m throwing out all my design career goals and schedules and plans and ‘going with the flow’. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do any work for studios – but I will only do so when I have the time and when it’s a call/assignment/trend that really calls out to me. There are opportunities at all of the studios I work with for this, but I have a tendency to try to challenge myself to new things (not always a bad thing, of course) or to do a gazillion designs for one assignment, rather than one considered one.
Mostly, though, I want it to mean getting back to enjoying creating art that I love – both creating and looking at. Enjoying the process and just really embedding myself in whatever I’m creating (this is a mindful thing in itself, I believe, from what I’ve read).
Friday night, I did some loose pen and ink doodling – flowers (so often flowers!) and Saturday night I dived into Illustrator and dug into my most preferred method – and then mixed it up a bit. I had such a lovely time (I did watch something at the same time – that’s a habit I may struggle to break – The Hundred Foot Journey, which was a lovely film to watch) doing and was really pleased with the result.
My favourite is the grey blue background. I like the faded silhouette leaves in the background, but I wonder if they might be better done to fit in much more in the gaps of the main design, rather than just as a repeat behind them.
Anyway, the point is that this is what I love to do. Create patterns from the heart – whether based on drawings, paintings or completely digital. Explore colour combinations and test out what different background colours do to a design (I love how different purely changing the background colour can make the feel of a design). Play about with fitting motifs together in a pleasing way.
I really like the effect of having the black and white collection of flowers, juxtaposed with the colourful print/cutout effect ones. This is a bit of a new thing for me.
The whole process of this was free of stress or anxiety. It was just for me, without the need to meet a brief, meet a deadline, or try to work in new methods. Proper relaxation. I hope I get to do more and more of it.
Peace, calm and embracing single-tasking
I’ve been suffering for a year and a half with numbness down the left side and almost constant dizziness. The severity would change, but it would be there most of the time. I had lots of blood tests done and a bunch of things ruled out. Then I was referred to a consultant neurologist, who ordered more blood tests, an MRI scan and a variety of other tests. He then referred me to a colleague for a second opinion: a couple more tests and a repeat MRI scan, to see if anything had changed. In amongst all that, I also came up with plenty of my own theories, none of which seemed to pan out. I’m now at the point where my next neurology appointment will almost certainly sign me off from them and send me back to the GP to try out other things, but I’m hopeful that I may have worked it out myself, finally.
One of the first questions that one of the first GPs asked (after the one who said ‘It’s a virus. It’ll pass.’) was ‘Do you have a particularly stressful life?’ My answer was ‘No, I don’t think I’m especially stressed.’ And I didn’t think I was. I associated stress with being worried about work and I had got to a really good point with work, where I had a pretty perfect amount that allowed me to make what I needed and do so predominantly in school hours, with the occasional few hours over a weekend or one or two week evenings every few weeks. (After years and years of working 15+ hours a day, this was a pretty good achievement and came mostly through better time management, improved efficiency and also getting the right kind of work.) I had also come to terms with the fact that I am actually good at what I do and had learnt not to worry that I was going to make a big mistake and no-one would ever give me work again. I also associated stress with money worries and, while we certainly aren’t rolling in money, we were comfortable and had built of buffers to deal with any slow work periods, or emergency spending needs.
So, of course I wasn’t stressed. When any of the doctors asked me what I did, I told them I was a publishing project manager. I didn’t mention that I spent four or five hours most days on a separate art career (Because it still felt like a hobby, perhaps? Because it was too much fun to count as work? Because I was still learning?). And I didn’t mention that I was a school governor and a playgroup committee member and a frequent volunteer to do this or that to help with school and playgroup. After the election, when I added to these voluntary commitments by becoming Branch Secretary of my local Labour Party, Women’s Officer for the Constituency Labour Party and also attempting to steer a new Communications Group within the CLP, I didn’t mention that to the new consultant when I met him. Because none of this seemed at all relevant. I love volunteering. I especially love (something that continually surprises me) attending meetings and joining in with discussions and even more love chairing meetings. I love that people listen to me and are interested in what I have to say and feel that it might have some worth. I love the challenge of making sure a meeting runs on time. I love trying to mediate when people get heated in their different opinions (not always successfully) and trying to make sure everyone gets their say and people listen to those who find it harder to speak up. I even quite enjoy writing up and reading reports.
But… one of the reasons I love all of this is that I had become addicted to the tension of anxiety (Would I be on time? Would I be able to keep the meeting running properly? Would I have the time to prepare the report? Would anyone listen to me? Would I say something stupid? Would I make a big mistake? Would be laugh at me? Would people hear me?) followed by the rush of success, or just getting through it. It was like a drug, really, and I think quite possibly there were chemicals and hormones swimming around, contributing to it.
We went on holiday this summer – a full ten days in a beautiful part of the world (Kingsand and Cawsand in Cornwall) staying in my Great Uncle’s lovely cottage there (thank you, Uncle Leslie). While there I did have to do a bit of work, but not much, and I was able to postpone it until we got home, in the end, thanks to some delays somewhere else. I didn’t do anything to do with any of my voluntary roles. I also made a promise to myself and to my family to try really hard to stay away from politics. (The leadership election had been causing me huge amounts of anxiety and sleepless nights, trying to decide who I should vote for and convinced that it was essential to get it right.) I didn’t succeed completely with that, but I did quite well. In addition, we did lots of walking, a fair bit of swimming, and even some ice skating. We had lovely food, lovely company – and even managed to converse about plenty of things without touching on politics! And I had loads and loads of sleep. I was in bed most nights by 10pm and sometimes even earlier, and asleep soon after. And, because there were grandparents there to play with the girls, a good few mornings I got an incredibly long lie-in. I think I probably had a few nights where I slept more than 12 hours (my norm is 5 to 6 hours a night). I sat and read a lot. I sat (or walked) and just looked around me a lot, taking in the beauty of the sea and the cliffs and the rocks and the flowers and foliage. I drew and painted a bit, though nowhere near as much as I thought I would.
And after the first couple of days there was no dizziness and no numbness. None. Normally long walks like we did would have lead to an increase in dizziness and numbness, but they didn’t there. It was totally and utterly wonderful. I also didn’t have a runny nose for the most of the time there, which is an almost permanent thing for me.
Of course, there were a tonne of parameters that could have lead to me feeling well for the first time in a long time, and I think there’s a good chance it was a combination of lots of them. My immediate thought on returning (started sneezing the second I stepped off the train) was that we needed to up sticks and move to the seaside. Still wouldn’t mind doing that, to be honest, but it’s not exactly a quick fix! But I think that getting more sleep was definitely a big part of it and a significant reduction in anxiety and also lot of exercise and fresh air.
Given how much I generally try to fit into my day/week, even leaving the anxiety issues aside, I wouldn’t be able to manage more sleep and exercise without stopping something. But I was also starting to recognise what the anxiety was doing to me, and had been for years. I think it started being a big thing (though I think it was probably something that had always been there to an extent) when I went back to work in-house for a bit. I spent the entire time convinced I would exposed as a fraud (not because I was a fraud, I hasten to add, but because I didn’t have a deep-down belief in my own abilities and strengths). I spent my morning commute worrying about whether I would get everything done, about whether I’d miss an important typo, about whether a typesetter would call to say they’d be late with the proofs and how that would impact on the schedule, about whether anyone would talk to me, about whether something awful would happen to the girls and I’d be 40 minutes away and also reliant on hourly buses. During the summer holidays, when various family members rallied round and took the girls on holidays while I continued going into work, I was constantly worrying about something awful happening to them and being really, really far away. This worry manifested (I now realise) in a stomach constantly ‘tied in knots’. And I had that, almost permanently from then until now, replacing those worries with different ones, adding more and more voluntary commitments, or art courses with deadlines or personal goals that I needed to meet.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have stood down from all my voluntary commitments. It was a hard decision to make, especially as I feel it is really important to give back in whatever way you can – but the important thing to note is that, at the moment, I can’t do it that way. I’ll help out sporadically instead of having a regular responsibility – I’ll probably distribute some leaflets for the local elections and maybe help out with a poster or some baking for school and playgroup, but I won’t be responsible for running meetings, typing minutes, writing reports or making anything happen. For a while.
Each responsibility I shed, I felt my stomach un-tightening. It was quite amazing, really. But that’s not the end of it. I’m still feeling pretty well, but I’ve found the anxiety and tension creeping back in for other reasons now. I’ve been getting tense about getting the girls sorted for going back to school (because I decided, for the first time ever, that we would clear out all the old uniform and go in with brand new uniform to start the term – some of it is worn out and some of it is too small and some, but really plenty of it is still absolutely fine and this was just an extra and unnecessary burden). I started writing down big plans for my art and design, with new goals of learning this, this and that by the end of the year and submitting X numbers of designs to this studio, that studio and the other… Until I recognised that I was actually creating future anxiety right there. I’m instead going to go with the flow, with some very loose areas I would like to improve on and no weekly or monthly schedule. I think I will try to do a daily something, though, as long as it’s a relaxing one and not one that challenges me too much and causes frustration. I’ve even been feeling anxious about not finding enough time to relax and do nothing!
School goes back next week, I need to get back into my work routine properly, which includes a scheduled day for art & design work (any other time can be art & design fun, instead). We’ll also get back into our family routines, with after-school clubs and activities and an earlier dinner and earlier bedtimes for the girls. I’ve already got back to my regular dog walking, which is wonderful. I’m also going to sign up for a yoga class and a mindfulness class. I’m hoping that both of those will help with the learning to relax and let go and that maybe I’ll be able to retrain myself to manage the anxiety and other emotions so that they don’t take over.
The other thing that I’m working myself up to doing, and may well be the hardest of them all, is to try to cut back on social media. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is tied to her phone so much, getting notifications when anyone comments on a post, or posts to a particular group, checking my newsfeed and Twitter stream to see if anything important or interesting has happened, scrolling through Instagram and Pinterest for pretty pictures (yeah, I’m not going to give that one up), sharing political news articles, silly quizzes, funny quotes. I’m going to try to do the thing where you clear out your news feed by choosing ‘don’t show me this’, I’m going to leave some groups and turn off notifications from the rest, I’m going to take Facebook and Twitter off my phone (see, that has my stomach in knots just typing it!) and I’m going to switch my phone off at a certain point in the evening (need to work out when – maybe at dinner time) and leave it until the morning. I’m going to set aside a time in the week to read the FB groups I’m particularly engaged with. I’m still going to be posting to my FB art page and would like to work out how to maybe keep it on there, so I avoid my personal feeds. I’ll also still share pretty pictures and patterns via Instagram (which cross-posts to FB and Twitter). #
I’m also considering taking email off my phone, but I need to work out if that’s a good idea for work or not.
Maybe one day I’ll take on another voluntary commitment. If I can. In the meantime, though, I’m going to do my utmost not to feel guilty and like I’ve given up. I’m taking a necessary break.
Holiday Flowers: New Colouring Book and FREE sampler
While on our holidays this year (in a very beautiful Cornish pair of villages – Kingsand and Cawsand), I did quite a bit of drawing full pages of stylised flowers – this seems to be my go-to relaxation technique – and I shared most of them on Instagram or Facebook. A few people said they’d love to colour them, so I decided to make a new colouring book largely comprising the flowers I’d drawn on holiday. You can buy it from my Esty store and here is a free sampler to download, too. I’ve done this sampler a bit differently – instead of a single design to colour in, I’ve done a page with snippets from each of the designs. Please do feed back to me on which you prefer, and of course, feel free to share your coloured designs with me.
Another colouring book – and a free sample
Well, it’s taken a while, sorry, but I’ve uploaded my second printable colouring book to Etsy.
And I am, of course, offering you a free sample as a little taster – hopefully it will whet your appetite enough to buy the whole book, but even if it doesn’t, I hope you have lots of fun colouring it in! Feel free to share your colouring efforts on My Facebook Page or My Instagram Page so we can all see!
This books all about the flowers and they’re all in a kind of Art Nouveau symmetrical style (one of my favourite designs/patterns to make). I’m hoping to create a new book every few weeks if I can, and will post them here, along with a taster, whenever I have a new one ready.
Have fun!
Colouring for grown-ups
So… it seems grown-ups are getting totally into colouring now. Awesome! I’ve always loved colouring, and used to spend hours as a very young child colouring in Altair Design books using my big tin of felt tips. These days I mostly just colour my own pictures, but now and then my daughters will ask me to colour something with them. Colouring can be a really relaxing and therapeutic activity, allowing you to lose yourself in the design and the colours, or concentrating your mind on the details or symmetry (You know I love symmetry, right? To the point where my table has to be set with the plates symmetrical, but not matching – two blues opposite each other, two whites opposite each other two blues on one side a yellow opposite and two whites at the far ends… Yeah, it’s a little obsessive.)
Spurred on by a friend writing a blog post about colouring for grown-ups (Mum in the Madhouse), I pulled out a couple of designs and made them into sample colouring pages for her to offer with her post. A month later, I was again spurred on by her to make a downloadable colouring book, which you can find on Etsy. Her post went a little crazy, being shared on a popular parenting Facebook page, and suddenly my Facebook page was hugely popular (in comparison to before) and people were asking about colouring pages and I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but it was lovely to have a whole new audience (I just hope they like to see lots and lots of patterns, as well as the odd colouring page I’ll throw in now and then).
Anyway… blatant plug coming up (it’s my website, I’m allowed!)… you can buy my colouring book on my Etsy shop (which I can’t add to the pull-down thingy up at the top of the site right now, because I can’t for the life of me remember where to edit the information that’s in there – oops!). And, these are the pictures you’ll get in it – 14 pictures in total and all based on my black and white ink drawings (many of them from the ‘Inktober’ challenge).
And, ooh look, aren’t I nice? Here’s a free sample of one of the pictures in the book! Right-click and save to download the PDF, or click to just open it up and send straight to your pinter.
Since that one’s selling pretty well, I’m working on another one, which looks like it will concentrate on flowers and birds – tentative title is ‘Feathering the Garden’, but I reserve the right to change my mind completely. When that one’s ready, I’ll let you know and I’ll be giving away a sample from that one fairly soon. You can see some sketches here of a couple of the designs:
Happy colouring!
On gratitude and the blues
This weekend, Chris and I both had to do a lot of work. This meant we didn’t have time to take the girls out to cinemas or swimming or to hang out in cafes and museums. They got their homework done, had their baths, got given breakfast, lunch and dinner and also had approximately 5 billion little curious questions answered. And then they read and tidied and watched a bit (not much more than normal, though) and played with each other and on their own. Mostly they didn’t try to tear each other’s heads off, and they definitely managed to restrain themselves from wrecking the house. Mostly they were happy and occupied and entertained.
And yet… I’ve been feeling grumpy and guilty and sad that we haven’t at least one of us been spending big chunks of fun time with them. I’ve felt resentful at the work (which is not anyone asking the impossible, but rather things suddenly colliding in the unplanned way that happens now and then – or a lot, really – in the publishing world). I’ve been frustrated that I haven’t been able to have my normal few hours of dedicated design time that I get at weekends. I have trained myself now to use design time and drawing and painting as my way of winding down from work and from parenting and any other responsibilities that happen to be throwing themselves at me in any particular week or on any particular day. So when anything cuts into that time, it hits harder than it might otherwise do.
So, I was feeling grumpier and grumpier throughout today and started to feel resentful about seeming to be the only person responding to the girls’ requests and demands (not true, but my grumpiness made it seem so). The crunch came when an earlier promise to have dinner made for me looked like it was to fall through. I stomped off to the shop to get the bits and pieces we needed – milk, bananas, creme fraiche. My mood lifted a little as I walked through the park, catching glimpses of snowdrops and crocuses, speckled with raindrops from the earlier shower, seeing patterns in the clouds and bare trees starting to show little green buds… At the shop, it occurred to me that the children had been remarkably good and well-behaved and kind, so I added pudding to the basket and then threw in a last-minute pair of Zomblings and packet of mini eggs (yes, that did entirely make up for no fun trips out – I know them well). And I may have added a bottle of wine for the grown-ups, too.
The walk home helped clear my mind a bit more, though the blues had not entirely lifted. I thought a lot about how our life before children was filled with work – we worked most weekends and most evenings (much less efficiently, somehow) and looked forward to bank holiday weekends because they meant we could get even more work done than usual with no phone calls or emails interrupting us. When I got home (after distributing my bounty) I cleaned the kitchen and remembered how much I actually enjoy doing that, when I have some peace and quiet and time to myself to think.
And then I thought about how ridiculous I was being and what a spoilt little brat, frankly. One weekend of working instead of spending fun time with the girls? One weekend of not getting 15 hours of designing in (and I did still manage to find an hour and a half to do some painting last night, and did a bit of sketching on my scrap paper)? One weekend where I had to stop work to make a few wraps or cups of juice? One weekend where I had to step away from the computer to brush conditioner-laden hair and pull a nit comb through it (all clear, still, hoorah!)? One weekend where we didn’t manage to hoover and clean the bathroom (OK, there are probably a few weekends where we don’t manage them!)?
One weekend not working out brilliantly, when so many people are working their weekend after also working their whole week. When so many people are having to go into work, while their kids go to grandparents or friends, because their zero-hour contract means they have to come in whenever they are told. When so many people are struggling to feed and clothe their children and certainly don’t get to make up for it by throwing Zomblings and sweets at them, or by sticking a £4.99 bottle of red in their shopping basket. When so many families are stuck in bedsits or even out in the cold, because they couldn’t afford the bedroom tax. Yeah, one weekend – or even a few – of having to fit in work, is really nothing to complain about.
I’m grateful for my two careers, for our established business and my burgeoning one, for our two healthy and bright and energetic and (mostly) happy daughters and our cuddly, and slightly deaf, dog, and the roof that doesn’t leak and belongs (mostly) to us and has many rooms under it, that are warm and dry and full of stuff and love, for our families close by and far away, for our excellent school staffed by wonderful teachers and support staff, only five minutes (or half an hour, depending on how many stones you’re picking up or walls you’re climbing) away, for our full fridge and working cooker and our internet access and many computers, phones and tablets, for the hundreds and thousands of books filling our house and the hundreds and thousands more just down the street and available for the grand total of absolutely nothing, for the doctor down the road and the chemist who give me statins and asthma medication for a teeny amount of money and the midwives and nurses who looked after me and the girls in their early hours, for the neurologist and the MRI machine and the nurses and their needles who will work out what is wrong with me, for the grand total of absolutely nothing, for the park only five minutes away and the other parks and fields and commons and woods so close by, for the town full of charity shops and cafes (and strangely lacking in men’s clothing stores) and brimming with artists and authors and poets and musicians and old friends and new ones. And for a tonne of other stuff, too.
So this week, the only blues I’m going to let in are the indigo paintings and patterns I’ll hopefully fit in if the other work calms down a bit. And even if I don’t have time for them? I’ll be fine 🙂
When it all just flows
I don’t really have a problem with artist’s block (touch wood) but sometimes it takes a while to get into a brief, especially if you’re trying to do something that’s a little outside your comfort zone, or something that’s not really ‘you’. A lot of freelance and agency work involves pushing out designs quite quickly and in quite large quantities, which can sometimes wear you out a bit. I still love doing those, and hope I always will, but it’s so lovely to have an evening to just go in my own direction completely.
I’ve had a few evenings of being too tired to sit and draw or design (evenings and weekends are my main design times) and had very early nights. Last night I was very excited to have the energy to sit up at my desk and do some designing. There were a few ‘money designs’ I could have worked on (for print studios and some aimed at specific mailouts, for example) but, after a few off days, I needed the time to just go with the flow. And the flow took me to poppies and ogees (yes, ogees are definitely my thing at the moment – I just can’t resist them!).
Chris spotted this awesome book in a local charity shop the other day and I had a flick through for some pictures to inspire me and landed on the poppies.
I did a bit of sketching to work out what I wanted to do and I also gathered together some bright and juicy poppy colours – used a couple of poppy photos as a reference.
And then I loaded up Netflix so I could watch the first couple of episodes of the new ‘Better Call Saul’ series (loved it!), and got down to playing.
I may have also had a couple of glasses of Prosecco to lubricate the creative flow!
I had such a lot of fun and stayed up until almost midnight, but felt fine for it. Some late nights are more wearing than others, but if I’m painting or designing to please just me, then those are the best and the most relaxing.
Have you found some time to just create what you want to create recently? What are your best times of day for creating?
The Landlady – Patternmash project
I joined up for Hannah’s Patternmash project at the start of January. Hannah provides monthly briefs to create patterns/collections for. Not hugely unusual, I suppose, but… her briefs are really well-thought out and researched and in-depth and she provides supportive moodboards, colour palettes and more. I think it’s the depth and the reaching beyond the comfort zone that has appealed to me. I love Bootcamp (must write a post about the Bootcamp January project, too) and MATS and the assignments that come from there, but the Patternmash ones have a subtle difference and make me think on a deeper more artistic level that I wasn’t actually sure I could (I am so very much all about the ‘making pretty patterns’ and usually really dislike having describe anything on a deeper level than ‘I saw pretty flowers. I drew pretty flowers. I made them into a bright and fun pattern.’)
Anyway, I’m all gushy about it after January. Who knows if I’ll be equally gushy at the end of February, though I’m already excited about another ‘outside my comfort zone’ brief, so hopefully.
January’s brief was to create a pattern (or collection – I think the idea is usually to create a whole collection if you can) inspired by Roald Dahl’s short story ‘The Landlady’, a macabre short story about a landlady of a B&B that has remarkably few guests, and a penchant for stuffed animals. Hannah provided the story, a moodboard and a colour palette and I have to admit being initially completely thrown. How do you make a pattern from a story? Surely you make an illustration? But I drew some teacups and I drew some carnations (the landlady liked her tea rituals and there was an evocative description of yellow carnations). And then forgot about it for a while, as my design time was being eaten up by money work and then I went off on some other tangents and then I did the Bootcamp assignment and then I realised the the deadline was only a couple of days away, had nothing else I absolutely had to do during my design time, so thought I needed to give it a go.
I’m sooooo glad I did.
I had definitive ideas for patterns as soon as I sat and looked at my sketches and I made them over two nights. My favourite is absolutely the damask, though I’m pleased with the teacups, too.
Landlady Damask
This pattern takes the carnations from the story, placing them in a traditional wallpaper repeat (a bit of a shout out to William Morris) and then adds in a little macabre twist.
Nightshade Teacups
This one is a little more subtle and picks up the teacups from the story, and intertwines them with tangled stems of deadly nightshade (the decorations on the teacups are also deadly nightshade).
Hannah shared my damask pattern on Twitter and someone (Sam Meech, @videosmithery) said they’d like to see a book cover treatment with it, so I had a go – and ended up making three (Paperback A format). Now, there’s an application for pattern design I hadn’t been thinking about much – any of my publishing friends and colleagues fancy some funky patterned covers for your textbooks?
If you like the sound of the briefs, check out Patternmash. There’s a free version you can sign up to if you’re not sure, but I highly recommend the full paid version and look forward to showing you next month’s.
Drawing, drawing, drawing
Much of my December designing was all done in Illustrator – though almost always starting with sketched ideas and plans.
I then squeezed in some painting at the end of the month, using some new paints – Golden Acyrlics – oh wow, I am totally and utterly in love with these paints. The only acrylics I’d used before were fairly cheap ones and I hadn’t really taken to them. Of course, I end up taking to the really expensive materials. But they are expensive for a reason! I only bought four colours, plus white and black, which was actually oddly freeing.
Anyway, this post is supposed to be about drawing, not painting! Maybe I’ll write a painting post one day. 🙂
This month, I’m diving into what I intend to be a super-productive and extra successful year. Included in that are MATS Bootcamp (this is a much more relaxed pace than the full MATS courses, but still great fun and you get to meet loads of other creatives around the world and see their awesome and inspiring work and learn new tips and tricks from them – just love it) which started on Monday, signing up for Patternmash, for which a new brief came out at the weekend, doing a weekly flower-drawing challenge (thanks Lidija for this) and also working to produce a regular supply of patterns for Patternbank and other pattern agencies.
So, I’m doing lots of drawing at the start of the week, which will then feed into Illustrator (and maybe even Photoshop, you never know!) later in the week. For Bootcamp and Patternmash, the assignments are not due for a while, so there may be less drawing next week and more digital work. But I’ll frankly never stop drawing on a daily basis – even if it’s just doodles and sketches around my work notes!
As I was looking through my pictures for some of the digital images from December, I noticed that quite a lot of drawings, too. So, yes… even when it feels like I’ve been concentrating on Illustrator work, I’ll still be drawing loads!
Goals, tasks and accountability – NOT resolutions
Continuing on the ‘I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions’ theme, I am still looking to start the new year with a fresh attitude and raring to go. Because the girls start back to school on Monday (5 January), and that’s also when I’ll be officially back at my (TAG Publishing Services) desk, I’m really treating 5 January as my start of the year. I’m getting myself prepared in lots of different ways over this weekend, so that sitting down on Monday morning will feel like a fresh start and I’ll be raring to go.
Design business goals
Shortly before the Christmas break, I set up an accountability group with five other designers. We are each at different points in our design careers and so have a variety of goals for the year and/or the next few months. We’re sharing our goals with each other and then will be sharing on a weekly basis our achievements of the last week and our plans for the next week. It’s a positive group where we can hold ourselves accountable in a supportive manner with people on similar journeys. We’ve only just started so I can’t tell you how good it is, but my feeling is that it will be very useful and give us that extra push to keep to our goals and assess our plans as we move along. If you’ve set some business or personal goals for the year or for the next few months, why not start your own accountability group, or find an accountability partner to work with talk over your plans?
I made myself some pretty goal and to do lists and printed out my medium-term goals, as well. Because we all know that beautifully designed task lists are much more successful than standard scribbled ones. (Don’t we? Someone must have done some research on it, surely?)
I’m also signed up for MATS Bootcamp and MATS B from Lilla Rogers. I’m considering adding in Mastering your Market (probably the middle option) from Pattern Observer, too, but might leave it until the next run.
TAG goals
The design business is only half of my business world. Chris and I also run a successful business providing services to the educational publishing industry. These days I predominantly do project management and design work, but also take on editing, proofreading, and CD development, for example. Chris does a wide variety, but is a particular whizz at making Captivate tutorials and extremely funky PowerPoints and has been putting together a lot of CD-ROMs this year. He’s looking to take on some more project management this year. We will be sitting down on Monday to have a start-of-year chat about where the business needs to go – and where we each want to fit in within it. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like, but it’s good to talk these things through so we can aim to do more of what we enjoy, rather than just leaving things to potter along as they have been (even if the talk ends with the status quo continuing!). In preparation for Monday, I’ll be doing my Inbox filing which had got a bit out of hand since I last did it in September (I am totally going to do it daily from now on) and I bought my diary (I’ve found that using a physical diary as well as Outlook’s calendar and tasks, really helpful this year – I mostly used it for work, but do tend to also add important household and school appointments and tasks in there, too).
Parenting goals
Now both the girls are at school, their goals tend to focus around school and after-school during term-time. There is some clothes and toy sorting that I’d really like to get done before Monday. After two weeks of a bit too much screen time (though we did set down rules at the start of the holiday to ensure it didn’t get too silly!) we will be moving back into term-time mode where there is no screen time in the morning and we where mornings concentrate on reading, spellings, times tables, violin practice and so on – playing, drawing, building, baking, etc. in any left-over time. (Weekends they get computer time in the morning.) They will be continuing with swimming classes and need to decide today whether they want to continue with gymnastics or change to something else (or cut an activity). The return to routines is almost always a good thing for us, as it helps them to know what’s happening and what’s expected of them. I’m keen to introduce some kind of more official chore sharing and have a few ideas I’m going to put forward for this. I’m also going to continue with my efforts to be more positive and supportive and to shout less. I think last year’s word (serenity) really helped me with this, but I’m still not quite the calm and supportive parent I want to be. I’d also like to make a ‘Remember this’ list for each of them, to help them remember to bring home their water bottles and homework diaries and so on. We also have a calendar (thanks to Abel & Cole) and I’m going to write down all the important school (and other) dates on there, so that we can all check and know who’s supposed to be where and bring what!
Household goals
We still have some big things that we want to do – buy a new cooker (more complicated than it sounds due to needing to disconnect and reconnect the gas) and get a new bathroom bought and fitted (including someone else doing the tiling!). And then there’s some general decluttering type stuff that needs doing and I also have a wish list for some storage solutions that I’ll be looking out for deals on. I have some ideas for the general decluttering/sorting, involving 15-minute tasks. I haven’t really formulated my ideas properly but may blog about it when I have. For the most part, apart from the biggies, household stuff will involve keeping on top of the general stuff and maybe coming up with some miraculous laundry schedule that there are never any piles of laundry waiting to be put away. I hope the chore sharing ideas we’ll be talking about will help with this.
Health goals
I would like to make a few little dietary adjustments – get back to eating yoghurt and fruit in the morning, rather than toast and always have at least one salad on the go (depending on the salad – some will last a few days, but most only about 24 hours). Other than that, my diet is pretty healthy. I’d like to make sure I do exercise that I can. At the moment, pilates and yoga seem to be good choices – swimming, walking and most gym stuff makes my dizziness and numbness much, much worse. I’d also quite like to try a 10-15 minute dancing session every day, adjusting to what my body can copy with at the time, because I love dancing and a short burst should hopefully not be enough to make the dizziness worse. Other than that, I’ll be hoping that the further tests and referrals will identify my health problem and then fix it. In the meantime, though, I’ll follow my body – if I get another period of feeling good, I’ll make the most of it and up the exercise levels a bit; if I have a really bad period, I’ll rest more and sleep for longer periods, and so on.
So, you see… none of those were resolutions – they’re all just general goals and preparation for the New Year. Happy New Year to you, too, and I wish you success, luck, happiness – and that your journey in 2015 is a pleasant and fulfilling one.
Word for 2015
I used to make New Year Resolutions. I’d resolve to give up smoking, lose weight, save money, learn to drive… And I’d quickly fall at the first hurdle with most of them. And then I’d feel sad and grumpy and like a big fat failure. Resolutions seem to be made for giving up, even though you’d think they were made for keeping. I’m sure there are people out there who love New Year Resolutions and stick to them – I’m just not one of them.
In 2013, I stopped making resolutions and starting choosing a word for the year. This is where you don’t make any promises to do more of anything or to give anything up. All you do is pick a word to be your focus through the year. It’s kind of weird, really, and a little bit like the visualisations that I have generally eschewed (while actually doing something very similar, it turns out). You kind of take this word and place it in your mind – you could write on a big piece of paper and stick it to the wall, you could have it as your desktop wallpaper, you could write it on lots of sticky notes and scatter them around the house (though the people you live with may not necessarily appreciate that). Or you can just pop it in your mind and remember it’s there. I find writing it down a few times – and, of course, doing so in funky hand-drawn type or using bright colours – the most helpful, though as it’s just one word it’s a lot harder to lose sight of than the traditional resolutions. The word becomes the back-bone to what you do through the year. When you’re making a decision, it’s there in the background and it affects your choice. You might consciously say ‘Which decision will hold true to my Word this year?’ Or you might just subconsciously pick the choice that enforces your word. Or you might make a decision and then see how it fits afterwards.
2013 was Happiness.
2014 was Serenity.
And 2015? 2015’s word is going to be Success. I think my main focus for success is my design career and selling/licensing lots of work, getting new commissions and so on (so if you’re an art director or agent reading this, do feel free to get in touch!), but it’s not just about that – it can be about lots of things, really. Success in any new thing I put my mind to. Success in getting my health back on track (whether that be finding a cure for my mysterious illness, or just learning to live with it). Success in tackling the laundry pile. Success in blogging more. Success in being a happy and helpful parent… The word for the year can be brought into any field and area of your life, really – that’s what I did before, and I feel it worked well.
I also find the words from previous years stay with you, because they are so much of a focus and part of who you are that year. Not sure how long that could go on, of course, but I don’t feel I lost sight of happiness last year, even though serenity was my focus; I don’t think I’ll lose sight of serenity this coming year, either.
Do you have a word for 2015? If not, why not consider it?
