How is your summer going? It’s been a little while since I wrote a blog post, so this will be a roundup of all the things I’ve been up to.

FOMO

A few of my illustration friends will be starting the famously wonderful and arty children’s book illustration MA at ARU in September. I would have loved to join them but it’s just not practical for me to travel to Cambridge every week at the moment. Instead, I decided to look for interesting courses and events closer to home. The first thing I chose to try out was pottery wheel throwing.

Pottery Wheel Throwing

My only exposure to pottery wheels and throwing prior to this was the famous scene in Ghost with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze. In other words, I didn’t know anything at all about it, but browsing the adult learning courses at my local college it sounded like a fun activity for a Saturday afternoon.

From the list of things we needed to bring, I only forgot the towel. But it turned out, while we didn’t need the sketchbook or pencils or anything, the towel was important. Oops! I felt better when I found out one lady had misread towel as trowel, but she didn’t own a trowel so brought a paint scraper instead.

The towel was for drying the wheel before each throwing to make sure the clay stuck properly. I used the bottom of my apron instead and it was fine. I don’t know what the trowel lady used but there were four of us learning to throw that day and none of us had clay flying across the room so we all judged it a huge success.

Once I realised just how much force you needed to use with the clay to start with, (a lot! but the teacher made it look effortless) then I got the hang of centering and managed to completely make something without any help. I chose two little pots to be fired and (randomly) glazed. I picked them up last week and they are so cute! Like egg cups for ostrich eggs or something.

Since that day I have watched a couple of interesting videos on people working with clay and love this one on Purifying Clay By Sedimentation from Primitive Technology. This is the sort of thing I dream about disappearing for a few months to do.

I enjoyed this so much I signed up for a 10 week course on wheel throwing with the same teacher starting in September.

Handletter Hero

I also took an online course on hand lettering via the Art Beat Club. It was fun and playful, but also quite intense, with an exercise to be completed each weekday for four weeks. I kept up for the first three weeks and even though “there’s no such thing as behind” and you get lifetime access to the lessons and support group, I’m unlikely to ever go back and actually complete those missing lessons.

Other Arty Courses

I think I prefer the in-person courses where you travel to a place with specialist equipment and learn together in a group. Last year I spent a day screen printing and that was also lots of fun. I’d love to try Riso printing but I’ve not found anything near me yet. Do you have any other ideas of things I could try out? Any thing you’ve done that you enjoyed?

Picturebooks

After signing with ABLA at the end of last year and getting my illustrator page and other promotional things set up, I set about completely reworking my Wade picture book dummy.

That has now gone out on submission and I’m working on a new dummy that is sort of sci-fi and sort of philosophical and definitely quite silly. Early days at the moment.

Postcards

While I work on my own picturebook ideas, I would also love to illustrate picture books by other authors. So I’m also still working on new portfolio images and getting them in the eyes of art directors and editors. One way I like to do that is to take part in KidLitArtPostcard day, which is the first Thursday of each month. That is tomorrow! (it’s ok, you can use old art if you want. You still have time to join.)

This month I actually made two new pieces, and now I can’t decide which to use tomorrow! Maybe both, one in the morning and one in the afternoon? Which do you like best?

Other Stuff

Over the last few months I also got a new scanner and created a watercolour swatch library to help create colour palettes for new illustrations. I’ll probably talk about that and review the scanner in a future post. (*cough cough* subscribe to the newsletter if you don’t want to miss reading that.)