I needed to prioritize my degree work, a book illustration and my children.
One thing had to give, which was blogging and some of the extra pieces planned for this website.
Don’t worry, I did this with a plan B in mind.
One of my assignments is to put together a portfolio, and I think that is the perfect time to touch up this website. With my degree I have to keep a learning log, this involves a lot of blog writing of my work and studies. So as the degree comes to the end I will start using that time on this blog (so I am not planning to disappear) just to get my degree finished. I have just started putting together some new pieces in the portfolio and work, this is a testing stage as I figuring out out what I want to display and what pieces.
I have been doing a lot of illustration work lately.
Broken Butterfly.
Part of my degree work that is based on illness and grief.
This is a wordless book about a girl and her butterfly.
Voice.
As you may know, last year I was part of AOI 2022 mentorship.
Voice, I had self-published in 2021 as a part of my degree work, I never intended much from it. There was interest in the book. This was created a degree assignment, the book was intended to be loose, almost like a visual diary based on the way I felt in an almost lyrical way about finally doing my degree and discovering my voice.
It was very empowering to create.
My mentor Caroline Thomson of Arena Illustration (Have an interview in my blog drafts to publish – this will be my next post) stated that it is a good dummy book, which is a good way to describe how I feeling about it. It could do with more work!
So, during my mentorship and degree work I have been working on this, it has taken a bit of a back burning to my assignment work.
The child of the White Lady.
I have recently finished a research project (3500 words and a body of work) my topic is “Can black and white illustrations for novel books truly convey deep complex emotions?”.
This came about due to Caroline again, during our time we explored fiction novel illustrations and I wanted to explore more as a topic in order to find out more.
Here are some of the results of my exploration and research.
The book itself may be a novel I write someday. I have my eye on a creative writing course, so will let you know how that goes.
AOI are open for their 2023 mentorship, I highly recommend taking a look at it.
https://theaoi.com/membership/mentorship/aoi-mentorship-2/
I know it is a bit in the future, I would love to mentor others myself. The experience has been life changing.
And while cannot show you a preview yet, I am doing some work again with the lovely Shamima Khatun, who recently has had the spotlight shining on her in the papers…
Check it out https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/23329579.brighton-miss-gb-finalist-trades-beauty-pageants-teacher-training/ Let me know if anything would like to see me blogging about or any questions just get in touch.