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Take a look at what I pack in my travel art kit when I'm out exploring. Hello you! Welcome back! In this blog post I am going to show you what I pack in my travel art pack, how I decide what to pack and what I took with me on holiday a couple of weeks ago! How I pack my art materials day to day Pack for convenience. If it's too bulky or easily covered up in your bag, it won't encourage you to pick it out! So day to day, I always carry around a small sketchbook around with me in my bag, along with a fine liner pen and a small pencil. Since February I have had a teeny tiny sketchbook and a 2B pencil in my coat pocket, so that whenever I feel the urge to sketch, I can grab my sketchbook really easily. This comes in very handy as we've been on a lot of very beautiful walks this year and I have wanted to sketch lots. However, my partner and daughter don't like to sit around for long, so I have to do super quick sketches to capture the scene before we carry on walking again. What I like to pack for a holiday When we go on holiday I do pack more. I take a number of sketchbooks with me and I pack my artists roll. I have been known to take a3 sketchbooks away with me, but this is partly because we stay in some lovely places so I like to draw from the cottage we are staying in. I do like to take a range of sketchbooks with me though, varying in size, layout and paper. The books have to be able to sit on my bag easily alongside my artist roll, food, a water bottle and a kite (among many other bits and pieces!) In my artists roll, I carry all the materials I think I will need. Again this varies depending on where we are going. One year we went to the beach and I took a small bottle of ink with me but I forgot to take a paint brush, so I did some lovely ink drawings of the sea and cliffs with a small stick that I had laying about! So how do I decide what materials to pack? Pack the materials you love and know will be excited to use. Don't over think it either. I like to pack colours and materials that will suit where we are visiting. I also consider the weather (ink is no good in the wind and if you can't sit down for a period of time!), what our plans are and that I have a young family to keep entertained! We usually plan what places we will visit on holiday in advance, which means I can plan ahead accordingly. If we head to North Yorkshire, I know we are likely to be at a beach, a historic building of some sort and often the National Railway Museum, so a range of sea sidey and old building colours are needed, along with a splash of colour for my favourite trains! If we are heading out for a walk into the Peak District, greens, browns and a drawing pencil are perfect. My advice is to pack the materials you love and know will be excited to use. Don't over think it either. It can be fun to add a couple of extra bits to mix things up, like a bottle of ink or some oil pastels too. You can be playful in your sketchbooks and sometimes adding a splash of colour that isn't true to the scene can also be fun and give you new ideas for when you are back home in your studio! What I packed this time Over Easter, we visited the North Yorkshire coast. We spent two days at the beach and took a trip to the National Railway Museum and Rievaulx Abbey. The weather was mixed but mostly wet and cold. I did hope I'd be able to sit outside our cottage of an evening to draw the view but sadly it rained a lot! Sketchbooks: Teeny tiny Hahnemühle landscape sketchbook A6 Seawhite of Brighton portrait sketchbook with white paper A6 Seawhite of Brighton portrait sketchbook with black paper A5 thin portrait sketchbook A5ish home made sketchbook made from a mix of paper in different sizes, weights and colours Materials: Ally Capellino for Tate canvas artist roll Small Windsor and Newton watercolour tray and water pen Vintage watercolour tube by Wallace and Seymour - Ultramarine Pink 10x Neocolor 1 wax oil pastels - mix of colours 1x Neocolor 2 Aquarelle water soluble wax pastel - Veronese Green 1x white pencil crayon A range of Derwent drawing pencils - H, B, 2B, 3B Faber-Castell fine liner pen - Black A pencil sharpener A cotton bud A bulldog clip to keep my paper from blowing about The funny thing I found this holiday is, apart from at the railway museum, I actually only used my really small sketchbook and 2B pencil. It was too cold, wet and windy to use anything else and draw for a long time! So it may seem a bit of overkill that I packed everything else, but sometimes I do get chance to sit and add colour to a sketch, or I have time in an evening to draw more but this time I didn't. Also, because I packed small, they didn't take too much space up in my suitcase, so it wasn't a hassle that I didn't use them. It was good to know I had them there should I have had a bit more time to draw though. I am really enjoying capturing a scene in really quick sketches at the moment and I am learning how best to draw a view in a short time using few lines. It's fun and different to how I normally work and a lot of these sketches are feeding into new canvas paintings. I have an accompanying video over on my YouTube channel HERE, if you'd like to see more. I am also really close to finishing my tiny sketchbook so look out for a sketchbook tour very soon too! If you'd like to see more behind the scenes of my work and a free colouring sheet every month, you can sign up to my newsletter below! Next time I will be taking you through how I made my homemade sketchbook, so keep a look out for that if you are interested in making your own! Until next time!

This week I am talking about how to self-publish and how I self-published a children's picture book. I will talk you through the process and the pros and cons I found along the way. It is a long read, but there is a lot of useful information here! To give you a bit of background on my self-published project, Elsie-Babe - I have recently self-published my first children's picture book. The story is a poem that I was asked to create illustrations for. Other than the words, the rest of the design process was completed by myself. We chose to sell online rather than in shops and this does change the process slightly. I will talk about that further on. So, what is self-publishing anyway? To self-publish an book, you (the author/illustrator) are creating, printing and distributing a book on your own, without the input of a traditional publishing house. You are in control of the whole process but you also have to put the funds into your project, usually upfront before you see a return from your book. Why we self-published and why you might choose to, is so that we had full control over how our book was going to look and feel in our customers hands. We also knew it would be quicker to get our project out into the World publishing it ourselves, than sending it to a number of publishing houses hoping that one would say yes. We had a book we loved and wanted to show it off! How I Self-Published a Picture Book: The Pros and Cons As I mentioned above, the advantage of doing things yourself, means you are control with how your project looks. The disadvantage in this is that, unless you outsource certain parts of the process, you do all of the work (and not just the fun bits like writing and illustrating the story!). I had a lot along to learn along the way because I was doing things that I'd not done before or wasn't maybe not so good at. You have to design the book, put it together in whichever software you choose, add the text, proof read, making your files print ready, sourcing a printing company, liaising with the printers, approving proofs, market your book and then send them out to your customers. It is a lot of work and it does take time to make sure your masterpiece is going to look amazing! I found it was worth it though! The upside of a traditional publishing house is that they will promote and sell for you, so you don't have to. When you self-publish you will need to promote the book yourself and then decide how you will sell your book. We chose to sell online. It is possible to sell via a shop, but again, you will need to do the work to make that happen (as I didn't go down that route, I don't talk about it in this blog). Legal Deposits and ISBN Numbers Now this bit may vary depending on where in the World you live. I live in the UK, so that is the information I will share. There is a lot of information about legal deposits and the different requirements online for different countries around the World, so you should easily be able to find what is relevant to you if you are not publishing in the UK. A legal deposit is where you are required by law to send a copy of your published book to the British Library within the first month of its publication date. This is so that they can add it to their records and "preserve knowledge and information for future generations and 'maintain the national published archive of the British Isles". This law has been ongoing since 1662 - imagine the amount of books stored by the British Library! It's a really simple task to complete. You send a copy of your book to the British Library site in Wetherby with a cover letter asking them to add you publication to their database and you should receive an acknowledgment in return. There are 5 other libraries across UK and Republic of Ireland (the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, Cambridge University Library, and Trinity College Dublin Library) that are entitled to a copy of your book to add to their records too - you don't need to send anything to them unless they request it though! As for ISBN numbers and barcodes - you only need to purchase them if you are selling your book physically through a shop. As we are only selling Elsie-Babe online via my Etsy shop, we haven't had to buy either an ISBN number or barcode. Some printing companies will do this for you, along with the legal deposit request, but it's always worth doing your own research into this as sometimes it works out more cost effective to do this yourself, even if it does take a little more time. Legal deposit has existed in English law since 1662. It helps to ensure that the nation’s published output, and thereby its intellectual record and future published heritage, is collected systematically and preserved for future generations. Legal deposit material is made available to readers within the designated legal deposit libraries. - Bodleian Library website Choosing a printer/ printing company This is surprisingly harder than I expected it to be. For me, the company had to be in the UK and hopefully local, the process to order what I wanted from my files to the finish book had to be easy to follow, the customer service had to be really good and they had to have really good reviews (this will soon give you an idea of how the companies work!)! It might seem like I have high expectations, but if I'm going to trust someone with a lot of money and a project I worked really hard on, I need to know it's going to be spot on! While the advance copies look great and were printed really well, the overall experience wasn't great. The customer service was poor when I queried things and despite having a file assessment completed to make sure the files were print ready, it turns out my files weren't assessed correctly and making amendments afterwards delayed the printing by half a week. As you can imagine, a poor experience like that is enough to take my business elsewhere. So when I chose a printer for the main batch of books, I have been extra critical and ensured I am choosing somewhere that will support me instead of hinder me and do a really good print job! So be picky! Scratch someone off your list if they have an annoying flashing message box in the corner of their website while you're trying to concentrate on their services page, check their reviews on Trustpilot and see how they respond to any bad reviews (this is very telling of how they might treat you!), is their website easy to follow and can you easily order the exact type of book that you want, will you be able to get a printed proof, is it clear how long the printing process will take without having to contact the printer once your files have gone to print? If you've put all the effort into making a book that you are proud of and can't wait to show off, then it makes sense to find someone who will put the care and time into printing it correctly too. The printing process Unless you are outsourcing the cover art or book design, this might be the first time you have to converse with other people about your project. Make sure you do a lot of research into what you want and what you are asking for. Once you are happy with your choice of printing company, you want to make sure your files are print ready with bleed and crop marks and preferably in PDF format (some printing companies do accept other file formats but PDF works well across the board). The artwork is given in two files - the inside pages and the cover. The company I used first had a free file assessment service - this actually didn't work out well as they told me the files were fine so when I sent my files for print, the proof came back with a chunk of the images missing because I hadn't been told in the file assessment that the bleed was missing!! I thought it was already there! The second company I used checked my files as part of the ordering process and asked any questions they needed to ensure I'd given them all the parts of my book design etc and then sent me through a digital proof to approve. Before the files are sent to be printed, you will (should**) be sent a digital proof at the very least. From some companies you will have the option to order a physical proof and although it is at an extra cost, I encourage it to avoid any nasty surprises when your books arrive! Once you've approved the proof, the book files go to print and then they are posted to you! Selling Your Book Research all your options and go with works best for you. Consider your time and costs and what makes the most sense for you. I chose to sell Elsie-Babe online for a few reasons. I didn't know how much interest there would be, I didn't have the money to put behind sending it out to bricks and mortar shops and I knew if I sold online, I could get my book into customers hands much quicker. I did consider a PayPal button linked to my website but in doing this, I couldn't control who was ordering and that would affect how I posted the books. While I'd love to send my books all over the World, living in the UK and sending things to Europe is quite the headache right now. So in the end I chose to sell through my Etsy shop as I can control which countries are able to buy from me and I can also set shipping costs per country too. Hopefully in the future, posting to Europe gets easier! With Etsy, I can see all my orders easily, they keep me up to date with shipping dates and I can order my postage through - it makes it a smooth process for me. They also let the customers know when their order has been posted. Why I chose to sell with a pre-order I chose to set up a pre-order because printing costs can be a lot of money! For me, I needed to know there would be interest in Elsie-Babe before I paid the money, so that I didn't end up with a pile of unwanted books hanging around my studio! Thankfully, I've just been able to put in an order of 30 books for the first print run, so no lonely books here! But I couldn't be sure I would sell that many, so by selling the book in advance, I had the money ready to pay for the printing when I was ready to order. I also put a deadline on the pre-sale too so that people knew there was a certain point where they wouldn't be able to buy the book, so if they wanted it, they needed to buy sooner rather than later. How I promoted Elsie-Babe Of course, without the help of a publisher, we had to promote the book ourselves. Which as someone who just likes to sit and make pictures, this was always going to be tricky. How would I reach many people?! Will people get fed up of hearing me talk about this book? Will they get annoyed by seeing posts about Elsie-Babe? I focussed on Pinterest, Facebook and YouTube for promoting online. I also talked about the book in my newsletters. There is also the power of word of mouth. When you have friends and family who have or know small children, you have a warm audience right there! A combination of all of these have really paid off for me. It takes perseverance and consistency, some well times social media posts, making it clear EVERYWHERE (social media banners, profile pictures, email footers, on your website etc) that you have a book to sell and some well crafted visuals to share. It is possible though. Thank you for reading. I hope this has given you an idea of how I self-published my children's book Elsie-Babe and also an insight as to how you too can self-publish a picture book. This is the process that has worked for me. It's likely other people may do this differently and that is okay too. There are advantages and disadvantages to both self-publishing and traditional publishing; neither one is better than the other. It depends on your circumstances and what you want from the process. I advise doing your research on both and deciding from there. That's all for this week. In my next post I will be talking about drawing outside and what I take with me! In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio updates. I am in the process of filming and editing new videos for YouTube and I also post to Facebook, so head over to either of those to see what I’m up to between blog posts and newsletters! It’ll be good to see you there :) xxx My monthly newsletter, Studio Notes, is where I share with you news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive a printable colouring sheet with each email too. Sound good?

Okay, so this week I thought I'd talk about what I learned from self-publishing a children's book and what the experience was like for me. I've recently just sent my first picture book, Elsie-Babe, out into the World and it has been quite the adventure. So I thought I'd talk you through what it has been like - the good, the bad (that weren't all that bad) and the exciting! To give a bit of background into this commission, I was given a poem to turn into a children's picture book. Other than the words having already been written and up to the printing process, I have done the rest of the work on my own - illustrating the book, designing the page layouts, adding the text on each page, designing and creating the cover, preparing the files for print, sending the files to print, liaising with the printing company, approving the proof, ordering the books to be printed, marketing and selling the book. Going into this project, I had never published a book before; either self-published or traditionally published. So everything I did, was for the first time and I learned a lot and fast! Other than illustrating, the bulk of the work has been learned on the job and I guess that is the best way to learn. Mistakes happened along the way and the process took a lot longer than I thought it would (I'm writing this now in February 2024 having just started selling the book and I thought I would have been at this stage 6 months ago!) #1 - Why Did I Self-Publish a Picture Book? So why did I self-publish in the first place then? Well, I was asked by Michele Fudge, an anti-bullying campaigner, to create a children's book from the poem she'd written inspired by her daughter. At the start of the project we had a traditional publishing set up in mind, where once the book was complete, we would send it to well known publishers. During the project I started to learn more about publishing and started to look more into self-publishing and the more I learned, the more appealing it sounded. There are pros and cons to both types of publishing. For instance, with a traditional publishers, they do all the liaising, printing and selling for you, however you don't know if/when your book will get picked up by a publishing house. With self-publishing, you can start selling your book as soon as it's printed, but you have to be prepared to do a lot of the work yourself, or outsource the things you can't/don't want to do. Ultimately for me, by self-publishing I was in control of how the book looked, how soon it could be printed and what it would feel like in the customers hands. There is a lot of upfront cost too. To avoid spending a huge amount on printing and then no-one buying, I released Elsie-Babe on a pre-order basis so that I know how many books to order. I have set a date to receive all the orders by and that gives me two weeks then to have them printed. As you can imagine, I was so excited to receive my first order and within the first week, I hit over 20 sales - talk about validating! #2 - The Good Bits The story itself was a lovely one to illustrate and I really enjoyed having a free reign on the way the book looked. Michele and I discussed the way the characters should look and she had a particular view for the book that I was happy to run with. Other than that, the design was on me. It was fun to play around with shapes and colour and I then chose to limit the palette and see what I could come up with. When it came to turning the illustrations into an actual book on the computer, it took a lot of deliberating over softwares/subscriptions. So while I researched, I set up a file in Canva to the book measurements and as the files were scanned in, I created my book in there. For those that don't know, Canva is in an online graphic design tool that you can create a huge range of things in! This actually worked out great and I could do everything I needed to with it. The only thing I couldn't do on the free version of Canva was set the file to CMYK, so I signed up for the free trial of the pro version. I am so glad that I did create the book online as my laptop refused to turn on not long after I'd scanned all the files and added them into the book format. Trying not to panic that my laptop had seen its last days, I was able to log into Canva on my partner's laptop and see all my files - where I did indeed finish the book! Canva make it really easy to turn your files in to print ready files that are recognised by your printer (Ensure you have print bleed selected from the settings then download as a Print PDF with crop and bleed ticked, along with flatten PDF and change the colour profile to CMYK). At the printers I chose, they have an option of a free file assessment that gives peace of mind that when your files go to print, they are set correctly and ready to go. Though there was a lot of too-ing and fro-ing with the files, I was able to get an online proof that I could check before signing off on the printing, thankfully at no cost. On the first take I realised my files weren't set up correctly, on the second go, one of the illustrations needed cleaning up and on the third go I did sign it off. #3 - The Bad Bits So I wouldn't say this was a bad experience at all. It was timely due to the way I create illustrations and I had to research a lot and I learned a lot. I would say the process would be quicker the next time round given all that I've learned (maybe a 'how to self-publish' is another post for another day!) The lessons (frustrations/mistakes) I learned though; Misunderstanding the PDF options on Canva cost me a few days and an extra proof! Partly down to the advice on the printers website and my inexperience with printing from Canva, I sent the file as a PDF Standard. With the print bleed showing on my files and the printers suggesting PDF Standard was fine. I didn't realise that until my first proof, the bleed wasn't actually showing. So I got quite a shock when the proof came back and a chunk of my illustrations had been chopped off! The process is a long one! As someone who likes to sit and create more than using a computer, I was not prepared for how long it would take to put the book together. Scanning the pages in at high resolution, creating the book file and adding all the illustrations, adding the text and ensuring it looked good while taking margins and print bleeds into consideration all took a lot of time. It was definitely worth taking the time to get things set up properly though, to get everything looking right! Close to the end of the process I realised some key parts of my illustrations were being cut off once the bleed was added on. So I had to move some parts about (thankfully I work with collage and the pieces were only tacked down) and then rescan them. A mistake that could have been avoided but easily fixed! #4 - What I'd Do Differently Next Time So if I did this again, would I do things differently?! Yes! I would. Here's a few things I would do differently; I would create the front cover first so that I could start promoting the book much earlier on. Once the cover was revealed, more people were keen to buy! This time I created the cover last, so I lost time in not having a mock up book ready to market. I wouldn't have major elements so close to the edges. While I knew of margins and print bleeds, by the time the illustrations are scanned in and these are applied, a lot of the edges are cut away. So next time time I would steer much further from the edge of the pages. I would show off my process a lot more online while the project was ongoing! As this has been a long standing project, I felt a bit conscious of talking about the book a lot. I got a lot of good feedback from it though, so I don't think I needed to worry so much! #5 - What I Learned from Self-Publishing a Children's Book - Would I Really Self-Publish Again? Despite this taking longer than I planned, I would definitely self-publish again. I learned so much about the creation of a children's picture book and I'm not sure you get that insight without doing all the stages yourself. Taking into account all that I've talked about above and making some changes along the way, I think it would be fun to do again. My daughter says I should do it this year... but we'll see. I want to really enjoy the glow of Elsie-Babe first! What I Actually Self-Published The children's picture book that I self-published is called Elsie-Babe. It's a story of a naughty tooth fairy. I illustrated the book with collage on oil pastel and coloured pencil backgrounds. If you want to learn more about the book, head to Elsie-Babe Picture Book | Nicola Ellen Illustration You can purchase your own copy of Elsie-Babe until 19th March 2024 at https://nicolaellendraws.etsy.com If you would like to hear from me monthly in your inbox about studio updates and some cheeky discounts, fill in the box below! That's all for this week. Thank you for taking the time to read today's post - I hope it has given you an insight into self-publishing if you're looking to give it a go yourself! I will see you in a couple of weeks for my next post! xxx

A bit of a reflective post looking into last year and forward to this year. Well, I didn't mean to leave it so long before I wrote a new post! I took the Summer off with my family and then once the new school year started, I dove into my Elsie-Babe picture book project and everything else sort of got forgotten! There is a blog post sat in my draft folder called 'Summer Sketching' where I had started talking about the sketchbook I made and the others I took on our travels over the Summer! (I'll try and get back to that one as I sketched a lot and it was fun!) It's been worth it though as just before Christmas, I completed Elsie-Babe. I've gone back into it over January to make some tweaks and there's one small illustration I wanted to redraw but other than that - I have a book! I'm really pleased with it too. If you want to find out more about Elsie-Babe picture book, head over to my website here! It's now available to pre-order, with the book being sent out in April! So exciting! So reflecting on 2023 and looking forward to 2024 then. This time last year, I posted about my word of the year being Consistency and some of the rituals I'd put in place to keep me consistent. Well after a few months, that routine fell to the wayside when other things crept up. I was ill a lot last year too which didn't help. So, this year, I am going to try again. But this time I have split my year up into 6(ish) week blocks and I am going to focus on setting achievable goals. Also allowing for seasonal changes and how they affect my routine and mood throughout the year. My goals in this first part of the year are to self-publish Elsie-Babe and to rebrand my website. I may also have opened a new Etsy shop of printables (https://aheadfullofdreaming.etsy.com too! Focussing on my Etsy shops and adding new products have been an ongoing project for this month for me. In the midst of all this writing and self-publishing, my laptop broke and until this week I've been borrowing my partner's laptop in small pockets of time. It's been both a blessing and a curse. No laptop means not being able to work on Elsie-Babe quite as often so that slowed down getting it to the printers. Working in small stints though, did mean that I had to rethink my priorities while I was on the laptop and only work on what I really needed to get done, instead of getting distracting by tasks that weren't helpful. Day to day, I want to focus on building good care habits throughout the day. These include building up a good skincare routine, eating well and exercising more. Having already started working on my daily habits slowly, they are starting to feel at home in my daily routine, which is refreshing and exciting. As a family we've been spending a lot of time outside and making the most of the lovely weather - even if it has been VERY cold! We've seen some lovely sunrises that make the early starts much easier. We have a very inquisitive and determined child on our hands, so our walks are full of questions and exploring and walking further than we planned! I am keen to get back into make some new videos and animations for my YouTube channel too (There are some videos from the summer of my sketchbooking adventures!) A new process video of Elsie-Babe went up last night and there'll be a couple more over the next month, so keep I can't wait to get back in to sketchbooking on our travels again this year and filling more of my hand made sketchbook in. It's such a good way to process thoughts and ideas and empty my head on to the page. Looking back at some of my sketchbooks recently, I was surprised by how much I remember from a holiday 10 years ago just by looking at my drawings! They're great little time capsules! Well I think that's enough rambling on for me this week. I am aiming to write and post every two weeks. Some of the posts I want to share are about how I have found the self-publishing process and sketchbooking from last year and also how I go about sketching out and about. There will be YouTube videos along these themes too which I can't wait to get into filming! If you want to bag yourself a free fairy colouring sheet, fill in the box below and you'll also get some behind the scenes emails all about Elsie-Babe. If you'd prefer to buy Elsie-babe without signing up to my email list, you can head to https://nicolaellendraws.etsy.com and pick up your copy there! See you in a couple of weeks!

Self-publishing a children's picture book about a naughty tooth fairy who needs to learn how to share with her friends! In today's blog post I am going to be talking you through my new picture book, how I illustrated it and the self publishing route we are taking. You can also be one of the first on the waitlist to pre-order Elsie-Babe. (EDIT: This now available to buy at https://nicolaellendraws.etsy.com with books being posted in April 2024) So first off, what am I doing and where did it all start? Well, a few years ago, I was asked by anti-bullying campaigner Michele Fudge, to illustrate a poem that she'd had published when her daughter was 2 years old. Michele wanted to see this poem made into a picture book and I have been lucky enough to create the pictures to go alongside these words. So that's what I am doing! I am in the final stages (as of August 2023) of creating this wonderful picture book about a naughty tooth fairy who keeps the teeth she picks up and doesn't share them with her friends. This book is so close to completion and it will be published in the next couple of months. You can actually sign up to the waitlist ready to pre-order during the Summer! More about the Author As I mentioned above, Michele Fudge wrote Elsie-Babe as a poem in 1997. Elsie-Babe was inspired by Michele's daughter when she was a toddler because of the chaos she created with her various antics. These would descend into a lot of laughter with everyone! Though you might not know Michele as an author or a poet, she is a remarkable lady who campaigns against bullying in schools. Michele helped to abolish The No Blame Rule for bullies in school in 2011 to ensure children who were being bullied would be protected. Much of Michele's anti-bullying work included helping to support parents of severely bullied children, as well as the children bullied out of mainstream education. She has gained a lot of support from many well known people including Sarah Ferguson - Duchess of York, The Scary Guy and Helen Worth. How did I get from sketches to final pieces? Some pages came really easily and some take more thinking about. Most references come from real life. It mostly all starts the same though. I drew thumbnail sketches to work out the layout and then made a simple dummy book with basic sketches to find the best layout and work out where the text will go. Once the layout has been worked out, I cut my paper the size the book will be and head to my sketchbooks. Sometimes I already have suitable sketches from previous times I've been out exploring and sketches. They can be used as the basis of a page layout - especially in Elsie-Babe's case having a woodland setting. One of my favourite places to explore is woodland and I love to draw trees. My interest of spotting fungi and wildflowers has also come in useful for this book! I also drew my characters from real life too - mostly my daughter and my partner. My daughter is just the right age and height to draw for Elsie-Babe. I was able to capture the proportions much easier than I would have been able to without real life reference. It's always worth keeping a sketchbook on hand and sketching anything and everything because you never know what might inspire an idea or if it'll come in as good reference material for a future project! Once I'm happy with my layouts and proportions, I get a basic outline down on paper for the final illustrations and I start blocking in colour. I layer my colours and materials to get the movement and opacity of colour I want. A lot of the backgrounds in Elsie-Babe are a layering of wax pastels and pencil crayon to give vibrancy and depth. Once all the first layers have been completed, I get to collaging the characters and details, bringing the pages to life! The pages are then photographed to be added to the computer for adding text. I photograph them rather than scan them because it gives them more depth and the accidental shadows enhance the details of the illustrations. Where do I draw my inspiration from? My inspiration for most of my work comes from my adventures out in nature. I love the outdoor World and all the insects, animals, birds, fauna that make it so beautiful. As I've mentioned in other blog posts, I take my sketchbook wherever I go, ready to draw things that catch my eye; beautiful landscapes, old houses, interesting trees, quick glimpses of ducks but to mention a few. These all either directly or indirectly feed into my final illustrations and paintings once I'm back at my desk. So for this particular project, I took landscapes from those that I know locally. I have taken note at the scale of mushrooms against trees to get the scale right, I drew my daughter in various poses to get Elsie-Babe just right, I studied moths and other insects close up. I drew lily-pads from Renishaw Hall gardens. I sketched lots and played around with scale. It's also a really good excuse to pick up acorn cups and sycamore seeds to draw from too! Scale has been one of the fun things to work with on this book. Seeing the World from the woodland floor like a fairy has been a lot of fun. At first I forgot there would be a difference between our eye line and a fairy view, so there are some very out of proportion drawings. Once I started playing around with the layout and scale more, the scenes became more realistic. So, why are we self-publishing our children's picture book? There are many reasons as to why we are self-publishing Elsie-Babe and the main reason is because we want to be able to have control over the how to book looks and how it is going to feel in your hands. It also means that we can bring the book to you within our own time frame - bringing it to you quicker than if it was being published through a publishing house. Being in control also means we can choose our printers, ensuring they are local, have good ethics and print with really good quality. We can also choose to release a limited run of books - which is what we are doing. We are going to be doing a limited run of 50. So if you want to join the waitlist for pre-ordering the book, read on below to find out how! Do you want to be the First to hear of the Pre-Order? We are opening up a pre-order about a month before Elsie-Babe will be released. So if you want to know when the pre-order is open, ready to buy your copy as soon as you are able, fill in the form below and I will let you know. I will also send you a colouring sheet of the Elsie-Babe world. You will also receive a few emails with behind the scenes info on the making of the book! Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope you are excited for Elsie-Babe's release. It is so exciting to tell you about it and I really can't wait to show everyone more of Elsie-Babe! EDIT: Elsie-Babe is now available to pre-order and books will be posted in April 2024. Head to https://nicolaellendraws.etsy.com to order your very own copy! That is all for this blog post. While it's the Summer holidays, my blog posts may not be as frequent now until September! Enjoy your Summer! In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio notes. You can also find me on YouTube and Facebook, so head over to either of those to see what I’m up to between blog posts and newsletters! It’ll be good to see you there :) Xxx

Today I am going to show you my favourite way to clear creative block when it arises, and how it helps me to get moving again. We all get creative block from time to time, artists and illustrators of every level. Some people are able to manage it better than others, some have go-to tricks to keep them on track and some of us need a little helping hand. In this blog post I am going to talk to you about one of my favourite ways to help when I am in a creative funk and also talk about a few good habits to help along the way. So let's get to it and help clear that creative block of yours and get you creating with confidence again! Pack your sketchbook, grab a friend and take them on an adventure! If I have lost all motivation to draw, THIS is the one thing that really helps me get back on track. Going outside somewhere with my family or a friend for an explore and taking my sketchbook with me and taking in new sights and inspirations! I always have a small sketchbook and at least one pencil in my bag to draw with, though admittedly I don't always use it! When I do, I like to see how fast I can draw things in little pockets of time. I find starting with a small or quick drawing helps get me started and then I start to feel like I want to draw more. My partner and daughter will usually shake their head at me when I get my sketchbook out of my bag for a super quick drawing! And for the most part, it usually is super quick. Drawing quickly allows you to focus on the one thing you want to draw and just capture the details you want. It doesn't matter if it's not very good, because it's just the act of mark making sometimes that is all you need to get you going! If you really don't feel like drawing, try with just a 10 or 20 second sketch and won't feel like too much of a chore. Like with most things too, you just need to get started and then it spurs you on to draw a bit more! Before you know it, you've got a few pages covered with fresh sketches! Taking opportunities to draw Good opportunities to draw for me are when my partner has gone to buy a coffee while we're exploring a castle, while someone I'm with has gone off to the toilet, while I'm waiting for people to finish lunch when we're out walking, my daughter and I will sit and draw while my partner is exploring wherever we are visiting. sat in a café while having a drink and snack, sat in the car getting ready to go out exploring, on a beach while my daughter fills her bucket with sea water! To have a chance to spend a bit longer drawing, I get my young daughter involved too! She can get bored easily if we're in a café and instead of resorting to electronic devices (though they have their place too!) we pack her own little sketchbook so she can draw too - it really makes a change from hearing 'what can I do now I've eaten!'. The promise of a snack and a sketch to encourage her on a climb up a steep hill to one of our favourite places, always works well. Once we are there, she will sit with me for quite a while drawing. She gets really excited to draw with me and use whatever materials I've brought and it's really lovely to spend that time with her too. What would make a good opportunity for you to draw? Can you draw with a your child or a friend? You don't have to go out purposely to draw, it can just be something you squeeze into your adventure without thinking about it too much! Pick some fun materials Pick a few of your favourite materials; like pens, colouring pencils, oil pastels or watercolours. Pick them in a few of your favourite colours or ones that suit where you are going to visit - don't over think it, just make sure they're easy to transport! I take a few Caran D'ache neocolor pastels and a small tray of watercolours, along with a pencil as my basic set and this covers most things that I like to draw. Sometimes I just scribble a tree in pencil and sometimes I have a bit longer to get my watercolours out. If you are out with your kids, ask them what they want to take - my daughter loves using my watercolours, and even has a small tray of her own that often comes out with us! What are you favourite colours and materials? You could try using your favourite colours to sketch your chosen subject instead of the actual colours; blue trees? orange sky? red rocks? Or just take one colour out with you and draw exclusively with that. It's a good way to gain new ideas! What I usually find happens When you've been out drawing, you feel really refreshed, especially if you are visiting somewhere new. Your brain is processing all that you've seen and it can make you feel very excited to get back to your desk and get turning all that new inspiration into a new painting or drawing. I love taking my sketchbook on holiday. We are tied to the school terms and sometimes I can feel very deflated and tired by the end of a term, so when we go on holiday, I get a chance to recharge drawing and exploring new, exciting places. When we get home, it all feeds into my work and I am one happy creative bunny again! Can you carve time out to get back to your desk when you've been on your adventure? A quick series of drawings inspired by your day out could lead to more ideas for paintings and more drawings! A few tips to minimise creative block Try and create a routine around creating - try to get to your desk even if you don't feel like it. Don't worry about bad drawings - you have to get the bad stuff out before the good stuff appears. Make it easy to create - have a sketchbook in your bag/by your bed/near the sofa ready to pick up and draw or write down any ideas you have. Keep going! The more you draw or paint, the more ideas you have! Want some more ideas for clearing creative block? If you need some more ideas to clear your creative block, I have a guide you can download of 10 ways I use regularly to get drawing again. 10 Ways to Clear Creative Block will have you back at your desk drawing or painting away! Click on the that there button and you will get this free guide straight to your inbox! That's all for this week. In the meantime you can join my monthly newsletter for studio notes. Or you can find me on YouTube and Facebook, so head over to either of those to see what I’m up to between blog posts and newsletters! It’ll be good to see you there :) xxx

How I created my book cover for The Waves by Virginia Woolf in collage and mixed media. Hello again! I am currently working on a big project that has been interfering with my blog writing time, so currently these aren't quite as fortnightly as I'd like! But I'm here and this week I want to share with you how I created a book cover with collage! Mixing media is my favourite way to create and it makes putting a project together so much fun as you can literally see the illustration come together with each piece you add! SO.MUCH.FUN! So here we go, how do I go about creating a book cover with collage... This was a personal project that I felt inspired to make after reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf. For those who have not read the book, this is about the passing of time for a group of young children as the book follows them through each stage of life, right to the end of their life. At the start of each chapter in their life, Woolf starts with a poetic passage about each stage in relation to the rising of the sun. It is a beautifully written book and you really feel immersed in nature as you read through the book. '...as if the arm of a woman couched behind the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow spread across the sky like the blades of a fan.' This particular description struck a chord with me and the image I wanted to create came instantly to mind. This isn't how every illustration starts, but occasionally it does happen and it's great! How I prepared for the final illustration (the gathering inspiration part!) I had a vision of how it would look and I knew I wanted the arm and the cliff to be drawn in pencil. The arm and lantern would be loosely placed to have shadow and I would be using my signature colour oil pastel of turquoise! I draw from life A LOT. It is the best way to ensure that things look correct and make them look believable. So I had my partner photograph my arm with a bucket in my hand (I don't have an antique lantern to hold unfortunately!) and using this as reference, I drew the arm and hand. In the last couple of years, we have visited the North Yorkshire coast fairly regularly, so coastal cliffs at Saltburn and Whitby are often the focus of my sketches. So they supplied great information for when I drew the cliff. Where would I find an old lantern to draw from though? Well inspiration strikes in the most interesting of places sometimes (especially when we aren't looking for it!). Imagine my delight when we went to explore the wonderful Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet in Sheffield and there is a beautifully intact lantern hanging in the Counting House - and it just so happens to be the correct age to match up with the book. Out came my sketchbook and I was able to get down all the details needed to draw this again back at my desk and turn it into the centrepiece of my illustration. Creating the illustration with mixed media The arm and cliff were both drawn in pencil. I loved creating the depth and texture with pencil lines. The bulb of the lantern was drawn in yellow posca pen. The fans of the sunlight were painted with white acrylic paint and yellow and green posca pen. The sea was coloured with my favourite turquoise oil pastel, along with some white oil pastel highlights. Blended together and contrasting nicely with the fans of sunlight. There's even an unintentional effect where the oil pastel meets the pencil where it looks like foam from waves washing up against the cliff! I filled the page with my flat elements; the sea, cliff and sky. Then, using a tiny bit of blue tac under the shoulder, I stuck the arm to the page. I wanted there to be a shadow as I photographed this, so I didn't want the arm to be stuck flat to the page, just like they wouldn't be flat if this were a real life set up! I love the depth this adds to my illustrations and it's a trick I use a lot. Blue tac is fast becoming one of my favourite tools! Who knew?! Adding the text Once I photographed the complete illustration, I uploaded it to my laptop to add the text. I use Scribus to do this. Scribus is not the easiest layout program to use as it's not particularly intuitive, but with some help from the Scribus help pages and google, I was able to navigate it and create what I wanted. I would normally use InDesign, however I don't use it enough to warrant paying for it. Scribus is free and a reasonable substitute - it just takes a bit of effort to make it work how you want it to! So there you have it! The creative process behind my favourite illustration! I hope you found this an interesting read! One thing I love, is learning how other people create even if it's not a way that I would adopt myself - it's just so fascinating to see!! That's all for this week. In the meantime you can join my monthly Studio Notes newsletter. You can find me on YouTube for fairly regular collage animations and I also post to Facebook, so head over to either of those to see what I’m up to between blog posts and newsletters! It’ll be good to see you there :) xxx My monthly newsletter, Studio Notes, is where I share with you news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive an illustrated desktop calendar with every other email too. Sound good?

How to make fun and easy stop-motion animations from collage illustrations Over the past month I have been playing about with video and creating some fun stop-motion animations from my collage illustrations. I have turned them into YouTube Shorts and you can see some of the animations I've created here. They aren't perfect, as I've just been enjoying the process of doing something new with my work, but they are a lot of fun to make and watch spring into life! So in this weeks blog post, I thought I'd show you how I create these little videos and how you can do it too! What you will need: A4 piece of sturdy paper/card Extra paper to cut out moving parts Paint/pencils/coloured pencils/inks/coloured paper - anything to add colour to your illustration and moving parts Blu-tack A flat board/large book to lay your illustration on when filming A camera of any sort A tripod or something to keep your camera in the same position A computer A basic movie maker/video editor - I use Windows Movie Maker (alongside VDSC video editor for extra editing that I can't do on MM) for a simple animation, it does the job. Step #1 - Decide what to animate Start by having a think about what you want to make into a moving picture and then create it! Nature works really well with falling leaves, petals, snow or flowers and leaves blowing in the wind. Insects are fun to animate too - especially ones with wings! I have been using collages that I've already created and some of them haven't taken long to create. My usual go-to is a background of an ink or acrylic paint wash and some painted or drawn details. In the picture above I drew the stones in pencil. In another illustration, I painted the stems of foxgloves in acrylic paint. Create you background on either plain or coloured paper and add any colourwashes and details that will stay static in the your video. Then on a separate piece of paper/card to your background, you want to draw and colour in the moving parts. Step #2 - Time to get set up "Stop motion is an animated filmmaking technique in which objects are physically manipulated in small increments between individually photographed frames so that they will appear to exhibit independent motion or change when the series of frames is played back." – thanks Wiki! So to create your stop motion animation here, you are going to create the movement by moving your loose illustration parts ever so slightly and between each movement, you take a photo. So you want to think of where the moving parts are going to start and where you want them to be at the end of your video. If you're animating a flying insect, think about how many times their wings will move to keep them in the air. Space: When you take your photos for this, you want to make sure you have a space where there is good natural light, a flat surface (I use a clean page of an a3 sketch pad as my basis, often laid on the floor or my bed!). Blu-tack your background down onto your surface to keep it in place. Tip: I sometimes use a teeny tiny bit of Blu-tack under my moving parts to keep them in place, and a little easier to control when moving about between photos. This works well on wings or flowers or leaves that are blowing about, though not necessarily on items you want to show falling or moving across the page. Camera/Tripod: To ensure a smooth animation, you want to keep the camera VERY still and in the same place and covering the exact same space throughout the process of taking photos. So you'll need a tripod to mount your camera on or something you can stick you camera/phone to - like a stool or a box (I've stuck my phone to a stool on a number of occasions!) Step #3 - Taking the photos With everything lined up and in place, you are now be ready to take your photos. So, start by taking a photo and then move your moving parts ever so slightly once and then take another photo. Then keep going. This part does take some patience, especially when you can't necessarily see how it will all fit together at this point. The more movements and photos you take, the more flow your animation will have. For my last animation, I took 69 photos, compared to the previous one where there were just 23 photos. It flowed much better as I was able to show more movement. Tip: By keeping some of the parts still, and just moving one or two of them for a run of a few photos, you can create a change in the movement. For example, you can show a leaf swimming down a stream, while other leaves are stuck behind rocks for a shot or two. Step #4 - Making your picture come to life This is where it starts to come together! Now you have all your photos, transfer them all onto you computer and create a file, just for those photos. You can then order them by date and then they should move over to Movie Maker in order (you may have to move a few frames around). Open Movie Maker, or your editor of choice, drag all your photos together into a new file and check they're in the right order. From here, select all your photos together and on the video tab, you will have the option to change the speed that each image is shown for. You want to look at under 1 second per frame, but play around with what speed suits your animation best. I often use 0.5 or 0.25 seconds depending on what I am animating. Step #5 - Play back! Once you've got the speed as you want it to be, play it back and see what you think. Now you can save the file to your computer and you have yourself a cracking animation! I love the sense of achievement that comes with completing an animation, especially as they can take a lot of time to create, but I really enjoy the process too! Congratulations! You now have your very own animation! I hope you had fun! Let me know in the comments below what you made :) Well done for creating a fun stop motion animation! What's next? I will be hosting a Stop-Motion Animation Workshop where you can learn the technique I use to create my collage animations in much more detail. You can fins out more, save your space here and sign up here - Stop-Motion Animation Workshop Sign Up . I hope to see you there! That's all for this week. In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio notes. I am now posting to YouTube fairly regularly with my collage animations and I also post to Facebook, so head over to either of those to see what I’m up to between blog posts and newsletters! It’ll be good to see you there :) ‌xxx My monthly newsletter, Studio Notes, is where I share with you news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive an illustrated desktop calendar with every other email too. Sound good?‌

My painting process and how I build up landscapes in acrylic paint from beginning to end (and a sneak peek at my new collection of paintings!) Hello lovely! I am so happy to see you here! Since January, I have been pouring a lot of love and creative time into a new collection of landscape paintings. They're inspired by those lovely old cottages and farmhouses that you see scattered across the gorgeous English countryside, hidden by vast foliage. Most of these are loosely based on landscapes I have had the joy to see in real life! Following on from my sketchbooking blog a few weeks ago, I thought I'd show you how I take a sketch and make it into a painting, from beginning to end. I am showing the process with a few different paintings as some are more finished than others at this point! This blog post has taken me a while to write as I'm still working on these paintings and they are in various stages of completion right now! They're getting closer to being finished now and it's so exciting to see :) So how do I paint a canvas from start to finish in acrylic paint? Step#1 - The Planning! As I mentioned in my last blog post, my sketches feed into my paintings. Most of this collection started life in my sketchbook! The first bit of painting comes next! I paint the first layer of acrylic paint onto my chosen canvas. I create texture on this layer too by building up the paint in different areas. I love the patterns and movement that can be created at this point! As the sky is the background of these paintings, my first layer was blue. Once that layer is dry, I grab a pencil and draw out a loose layout of what I'm going to paint. Step #2 - Colour Blocking Next I pick my colours and I do like to keep them simple. For this collection, I picked a light and dark blue, light and dark green and a brown for my main colours, mixing them with white as needed. I mix all the shades of colour from these alone. I chose yellow acrylic paint and pink oil pastel to add highlights and details. The next step is to block in the colours to get a feel for how things will sit on the canvas. These aren't necessarily the tones I will stick with but by using a similar colour, it shows me how balanced the painting will be. "Blocking in the colours and shapes, gives me an idea of how balanced the painting will be" - Nicola Ellen Step #3 - Starting to Add to the Shapes From here, I keep adding new layers of colour, testing the shades I want as I go along, especially as sometimes the paint dries darker than I'd like, as you can see with the browns in the picture below. At this point, the scene starts to come together a bit more and things start to look more recognisable; trees start to look more like trees, hedges look more hedges and a landscape begins to emerge! I go through this process for a while and changing colours and shapes so they look just as I want them too. There is a LOT of too-ing and fro-ing at this point and I paint many layers getting the colours to look right. The foliage in the painting below has gone through many shades and tones of green and even in the third photo, the trees on the right still need some work on them! I particularly love painting trees. As they get closer to looking as I want them, I love using an almost dry brush when the paint is drying and really hard to move about as it takes on a great foliage look! Step #4 - Adding Detail Now details like roof tiles, windows, doors, grass, tree bark, etc can be added. Initially they are flat colour but they soon start to build up texture and detail and really bring the picture to life. Step #5 - Building up More Detail Adding the last bits of detail in oil pastel and making the scenes pop! All in moderation though as a little goes a long way and I don't want to be ruining the painting at this point!! Of course, I sign each painting too! Lastly, a coat of varnish is added to protect the paint. So there you have it... That's my process. The process of how I paint landscapes and approach all of my paintings. It can take time, but the build up of a landscape but it's a lot of fun and very meditative. How do I get my hands on one of these paintings, I hear you ask? Can we see them all in full? On the 2nd April, I will be launching the full collection. To be one of the first to see these, you will want to join my mailing list as I will be sending out a preview email on the 31st March. Just fill in the form below and you'll be one of the first see the new collection in full! See you there! :) That's all for this week. In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio notes and a preview of the landscape collection. Last month I accidently deleted the instagram app from my phone and I've been enjoying life without it, so for the time being, I'm not hanging out on instagram. ‌ xxx My bi-monthly newsletter is where I share news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive an illustrated desktop calendar each email too. Sound good? ‌

How I get unstuck when I'm stuck for ideas to draw or in a rut. This week I am talking about my sketchbooks, their importance and what I've been sketching recently. They are really good for helping me move out of a rut or if I'm stuck for ideas. So let's take a look; what's so good about sketchbooks anyway? Why Keep a Sketchbook Anyway? Keeping a sketchbook handy is so useful to document and make note of images, words, colours, life that interest you. I often take my sketchbooks on holiday and draw the scenes that peak my interest. They help me process the world (like a visual notetaking kind of thing!) and I love diving back into my sketchbooks after a holiday and turning them into bigger illustrations. I've not always been good at keeping sketchbooks and I know not everyone uses them. I'm still not regularly sketching, but when I do, I always feel much better for it! The ideas flood in and in the process off drawing one particular thing leads to other ideas and more drawings - sometimes they are related to the initial subject, sometimes they are off on a tangent! Some of my most recent sketches are currently being worked up into paintings! A lot of sketches inspire illustrations too. Where to Sketch? I draw wherever I can and I have sketchbooks everywhere. I have a sketchbook in my bag, one on the side of the sofa and a few on and around my desk! Most recently my drawings have been at my desk. I do love to draw outside though because it's so much more accurate than drawing from a photo that you take to sketch from later. I do take quick photos to draw from too sometimes. They're imperfect and I don't draw directly from them - it's more just to remind me of detail that I want to use in an illustration - movement, colour, shape, composition. "Drawing Outside Feels Good. Here’s the maths: The feeling of flow while drawing + The extra boost of being in the elements = Happy human!" – Helen Stephens Drawing outside is a lot of fun and I recommend checking out Helen Stephens' #walktosee on Instagram. There is nothing like scribbling down what ya see while you're exploring outside. Drawing from memory is also great. Sometimes I don't get to sketch outside but I see something I want to draw or a colour scheme I want to take note of. When I get home, I get my sketchbook out and draw what I can remember. Sometimes you might forget smaller details of what you saw, but what happens instead is that you remember the parts that were most important to you and there is a charm in that too. So what have I been drawing recently? I LOVE architecture especially when it's set in a beautiful landscape. Recently a house that I love that is nearby to us went up for sale. Unable to draw it from life, I chose the next best thing and looked up the details of the house online. I was able to draw views of the house that you can't see from the road which was great - that's where the best views are!! I soon ended up down a rabbit hole of looking at houses for sale in our local area and sketching gorgeous houses with beautiful gardens, with amazing views of the landscapes and some with overrun gardens as I went along. Going to give it a go? So that's why I love to sketch and if you're stuck for inspiration or motivation to get going, grab a sketchbook or some scrap paper (no need to be precious!), a pencil and draw whatever you fancy (don't think about it too much, even the view at your desk or out of your window will work just fine!). I promise you'll feel better for it! Even if I don't like what I've drawn, I always feel like I've moved passed the block. I hope that's given you a little insight on how I generate new ideas or clear a creative block! To see more of my sketchbook pages, head to www.nicolaellenillustration.com/sketchbooks I'll be back in a couple of weeks. In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio notes or head over to instagram. xxx My bi-monthly newsletter is where I share news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive an illustrated desktop calendar each email too. Sound good?

How I'm starting the year with small changes and more intention. So I have yet to sit down and set my goals for the year but I am slowly easing my way into the new year with small changes and I am trying to move with more intention! I have set non-negotiables for each day and started creating rituals to make my day more enjoyable, because lets be fair, when you work from home, it can be easy to slip into autopilot or be distracted by housework. For most of December, I was bed bound with flu and hadn't created anything for a long time, so I felt like I needed a more nurturing start to 2023. While I haven't got it all figured out yet, being experimental and more intentional with my time does feel good! My Word of the Year I've had a word of the year for a couple of years now; 2021 was Trust and 2022 was Growth. Last year I learned a lot about myself and came to realise that I was all over the place and I didn't really have a lot of focus. I also spent a lot of time resting knee and foot injuries, so I spent a lot of time working from my bed instead of the studio! I missed having things to anchor my days with. So this year, I am focusing on Consistency. Consistently showing up for my business and my health. Already having it noted down in my diary when to schedule newsletters, blog posts and website checks, making it easier to remember when things need to be done, giving myself accountability to get things done! Painting and exercising everyday or as close as I can to daily! Consistency I find creating a routine is difficult. I have 6.5 hours each to work while my daughter is at school. I then have a couple of hours once she's gone to bed. Not all days are equal either, as there are a couple of days where household errands take priority. So trying to do things at the same time each day is tricky! Progress is better than perfection though! I am currently reading a very enlightening book called Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. Alex talks about many notable creatives and how they didn't/don't work vaguely on their most important work all day, but instead they dedicated 2-6 hours a day of intense work, in one or two bursts. This is done consistently at the same time every day, whether inspiration is there or not and this is how vast amounts of respected and much loved work has been created for decades. This month, I set out to do the same. Each day I have dedicated 2 hours to painting canvasses. Though I am still pretty inconsistent in the time I paint each day, I have shown up most days and over a few weeks, I have made a lot of paintings. The act of creating does after all create more ideas. After a few months of creating nothing, this has been a surprisingly freeing way to work. It's a really good way to keep myself accountable and going back to my studio day after day. Personal Health Back in December I signed up to a beginners Pilates course in a bid to build up my core and upper body strength. I am notoriously bad for getting stuck into yoga and a few days later giving up. My problem wasn't with yoga, I just couldn't make time for exercise. Again, I don't have a set time yet at which I get out my mat, but I have been making Pilates a non-negotiable part of my day. Two weeks and a half weeks in and I have only missed a few days. I am feeling better already too! Who knew?! (Everyone other than me probably!) Creating Daily Rituals I have unintentionally paired sitting down to paint with my favourite Birdhouse Tea House Chai tea. Making it slowly with loose tea leaves and an added star anise (with a dash of oat milk please!) has become a pre-painting ritual. I look forward to both so much! I am eager to set up morning and bedtime rituals too, as I am definitely guilty of picking up my phone for a scroll first thing after meditating. I also spend way longer than I ought to sat reading downstairs, when I should be getting an earlier night!! 2023 So while I will be goal setting for the year, this weekend, easing myself in gently with making small changes and working on them consistently has helped set me up right for the year ahead. I feel good and small changes are easy to stick to in the long run. They are becoming habitual now. For now that is all and I will see you lovely people in a couple of weeks with my next post. In the meantime you can join my newsletter for studio notes or head over to instagram. xxx My bi-monthly newsletter is where I share news and behind the scenes from the studio, along with tips, discounts and freebies. This is the only place I announce discounts for my shop and you also receive an illustrated desktop calendar each email too. Sound good?

We all know I love books, both reading and creating them. But what did I love reading last year? This post is inspired by amazing lady Leonie Dawson's best books of 2022 blog post - which you can read here and you should, because there are some brilliant books on her list! I really enjoy looking back at what I've read during the year and in 2022, I read 51 books! My target was 25 books! Not bad ey?! So what did I read? Well, all sorts! I re-read the Harry Potter series for the first time in a decade. As a family we have worked our way through a lot of the Famous Five series, started the Paddington Bear novels and discovered Simon Farnaby's Wizard series. I discovered Dara McAnulty and in turn discovered more about myself, learned about Tom Waits, sailors in Lord Nelson's day and the Sitwells of Renishaw. I took up basket weaving and learned that Ice Cream is indeed for Breakfast. It's a lengthy post, so grab yourself a hot drink and let's take a look at my faves shall we? Fiction Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens/Peter and Wendy by J.M.Barrie After watching Peter Pan and the Tinkerbell films may times, I was curious to read the original books that inspired the films. I really enjoyed the books. They do vary from the story we are used to but that is no bad thing. The story is really well written too. This isn't one for young children though as it does get violent! Oranges are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson This is at least the second time round of reading this book. Full of humour, loosely based on Winterson's experiences and really well written. I loved it just as much this time round as I did the first time I read it. Famous Five: Five go to Smuggler's Top by Enid Blyton We're reading my old Famous Five books and of the eight or so that we read last year (we're now on book 12!), this one was definitely my favourite. I find a lot of the book plots can be guessed early on, but this one was full of twists and turns throughout. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Bennett Another book I kept from when I was little. I read this in 2021 for the first time in many years and loved it so much I read it again in 2022. Rooted in Yorkshire and surrounded by nature, this story really resonated and I felt really free reading it. So beautifully written, I think from a mental health perspective, there is a lot to be learned from many of the characters and their journeys throughout the book. It's on y list to read again this year! James Herriot: Vet in Harness by James Herriot A really well written collection of heart warming animal anecdotes based on real life veterinary stories. There's a lot of wisdom and humour and I didn't want to put this one down. I loved reading about the different animals and their usually trouble filled stories. A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond (Illustrated by Peggy Fortnum) Talking of trouble filled stories, is there a more lovable character who gets themselves into more trouble than Paddington? This book was full of really funny stories that kept us all laughing. A special mention goes to Peggy Fortnum who captures Paddington's haphazard personality so well in her illustrations. They really add to the story too! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K.Rowling I really enjoyed revisiting this series again. Though Harry does get a bit whiney and I do miss the Hogwarts based stories of the first few books, I couldn't put this down. There's always a weird sense of emptiness reading the last book in a series though, don't you think? Like, where's the next book please...? Non-Fiction Tom Waits - Innocent When you Dream by Mac Montandon A collection of interviews from Tom Waits spanning his many years in the music industry. They give as good an insight as you will get without an autobiography by the man himself. Jack Tar by Roy & Lesley Adkins I love a bit of naval history and this was a really interesting book to add to that. However, it's very graphic in places and I couldn't even read the chapter on medical procedures! A great insight to the British navy and great warships of old though. Diary of a Young Naturalist by Dara McAnulty This was really eye opening book for me as Dara talks about autism and how he sees and connects with the World around him. This really hit home and got me thinking about my own experiences. I actually read this for an illustration competition, but it's a book I like to keep dipping back into. Don't you just love books like that? Happy Gut, Happy Mind by Eve Kalinik Another eye opening book for me as I do have digestion struggles and anxiety struggles too. Learning that the two were linked fascinates me. So many tips and information on how to make the two work with each other. Some fab recipes in there too! Ice Cream for Breakfast by Laura Jane Williams A brilliant book about how it's okay to release that inner child of yours, despite being an adult! Making life more fun, like when we were kids. So there you have my round up of my favourite books that I read last year! An unashamedly arbitrary mix of books, and most that I picked off our bookshelf! The rest I borrowed either from the library or my Mum! :) My target for this year is 35 books! I am excited to see what books I'll be getting stuck into this year. Leave a comment and let me know which books you love. What should I be reading this year? What's on your reading list for 2023?