If I have been quiet all over again it is because this summer has been pretty busy for me. No news is usually good news and mine is pretty much the summer standard. Summer holidays primarily mean entertaining my boys, so only shreds of my time are actually spent on artistic pursuits (photography excluded seeing as this is so portable). 

So that I don't bore you with the full account, here are some notable moments as recorded in sketchbook or camera:
- a visit to Longleat left me in awe of the estate. I am yet to write a blog about it for my husband's tourist guiding website but the photo opportunities were marvellous. This is a collage I added to his instgram feed back in July. 

​It’s been a while since my last post and if you think I lost interest you are quite likely right. Not everything that goes on is worth sharing and on balance I’d classify most days as mundane (boring, even) and very few sufficiently exciting to want to shout about.
 
Excitement for something new is what brings me to my blog today – my friend Sarah and I went to see The Sculpture Park nr Farnham today, a place we’d both heard of and had on our lists and which we happened to experience for the first time together. The park hosts in excess of 600 sculptures (for a list of exhibiting artists see https://www.thesculpturepark.com/artists) set along a 4- routes trail which total a modest length of about 2 miles. To ensure that you see everything and walk the full 2 miles you are encouraged to follow the yellow route, then the red, then the blue and finally the green. There is no café at the site which is a shame, but there is a lovely picnic spot where you can enjoy your food and well-behaved dogs on leads are also allowed in. 

​Everyone’s work process is different. I like reading other people’s ‘how to’ pieces and today I am going to share one of my methods of developing an image.
 
I always start with a sketch. I love working from life but sometimes a photograph is just as exciting. For this sketch I worked from a photo of an urn in the Italian garden at Hever Castle. I confess my fascination with Instagram photos to which I often respond with a quick sketchbook drawing. Here, I was particularly interested in perspective and I responded to the photograph as I recently discovered Hever Castle and fell in love with its beautiful grounds. In fact, I photographed this urn myself on a couple of occasions so I suspect the image was latent in my brain.
 
The next thing that fascinates me in a new image is its ability to morph into something new every time you change something about it digitally. I will therefore often photograph my work and post-process either in a phone app or in an Adobe package. Here I used PicsArt for a quick play. I wanted to add to the image while also holding on to the initial contour drawing in blue (I used a blue Frixion ball pen) – change without changing too much. Eventually I settled for this effect which defines the lights and shadows and therefore enhances the depth in the image. 

I had the opportunity over the last few days to consider how very little we actually know about the people near us and how much importance we give to external influences when making our snap judgments. I stand corrected twice – first, I gained huge respect for a well-known artist who I never coveted much (boy, was I wrong?!?) and last, I learnt that someone I spent 4 years with in university (not on an Art degree programme) is a most amazing fashion designer. I want to show you her recent work, the eye opener that I had so many years after our graduation. Well done Cristina!

www.facebook.com/cristina.tatomirescu/media_set?set=a.1251327991659937.1073741845.100003482434234&type=3&pnref=story

​And now for the reason of my writing today – to show you the first in a series of birthday card designs that I will be working on. One image is showing some brainstorming (I wanted something very simple, almost sketchy, with  watercolour finish) and another shows the finished A6 piece that will go to a little boy at the end of this week. 

​I am planning to extend this work to a small series of 4 or 5 designs that will be on sale once my research into effective mass-production, pricing and promotion is complete. Hopefully by then I will also have a small Christmas range ready. I know! Only June and already thinking about Christmas! However, merchandisers out there know that I’ve actually left it rather late for this year. After all, consider also that the big fashion houses are already showing their Spring 2018 collections! 

I think therefore I am ... this phrase coined by Descartes still haunts us centuries later. 
Today I wrote the first ever blog for my husband's business and now that I am getting the hang of blogging, something inside prompted me to think 'I blog therefore I am'. What does that mean then? Do a few words thrown to the ether define who I am?  Or is it maybe that the comfortable feeling I am developing for a new activity is prompting me to feel good in my skin and therefore accept myself as a blogger? I prefer the latter.... 

Beyond the superficial level, the question remains: Who am I? I've been battling this question for a little while now while indulging the transition from academic / corporate me to.....well, just ME. The only compulsion I have, the thing that has to happen to appease my soul is drawing. I draw therefore I am. I draw for me, for my mind and soul, for sanity.  Along the way I learnt to stop drawing for 'likes' (but if you have a sure way of converting likes to commissions please give me a shout) and simply draw, like I breathe - no questions asked, no agenda, just me and the tools of my craft. It feels like I found myself. 

On this note, I leave you with a question - Who are you? and a piece of news - I just accepted my place on a coveted MA Illustration starting this September. 

​A friend of mine called me ‘miss self-deprecating’ the other day and, you know what?!, emotion aside, she is right. I wish I could pinpoint the moment in my life when I decided that I cannot do things as well as everyone else, that I am not good enough. Even now, as I write, past spills into present and I read back those sentences written not in the past tense, but in the present. ‘I cannot do’ …. ‘I am not good enough’…..  I wish I could go back in time to that moment and that version of me and give her a stern talking to about the domino effect she was / still is creating on my life.  Instead, I reach to me now and to you reading this to say that I did something amazing, something I walked into a room thinking I wouldn’t be able to do and walked out of the room grasping tightly and still trying to get my mind to absorb fully. Moments like this one, really big and special ones that can turn your life around or leave you crushed going back to the drawing board…. moments like this are rare. I sit here and contemplate the insanity of my inner rhetoric – how could I doubt my ability? I’ve been so amazingly fortunate in life to have a few moments like this one when I grabbed on to dreams I never thought would come true. I want to sit with that thought for a while and ask myself why I still doubt … As I do that, I leave you with a photo of a book  closely related to my latest success and which I propose to tackle ahead of September. 

The End
It's a strange way of starting a blog, or for that matter any piece of writing, but bear with me while I explain something about the fluxus of change that I've been entertaining for some time now. For brevity, I'll start fairly close to the end so please don't go off getting that cup of coffee just yet. 
A year ago, in a moment that I can only define as (very) late teenage rebellion I made a wild decision. The thing is, by that stage I had already been through an arduous process  following my dream (and fulfilling every expectation I associated those near and dear to me with)  and got what I wanted too so it is quite fair to say that I was living "the dream".... one of them anyway. The problem was that the other niggly side of me also had a dream to fulfill and for reasons that fit in a book, not a blog, I decided to press pause and take a sabbatical.  I'll call this my dream hopping moment. 
What followed was a year of sheer play, hard work and joy. Play was the defining word for the most part and please believe me when I tell you that all my best work during the last year is the result of adopting a relaxed and playful attitude (as opposed to controlling and pre-conceived). This one year journey took me through amazing artistic experiences and saw me for the first time really listening to and developing a whole new part of my brain. I developed a strong interest in mental health and spent great chunks of time researching it in the context of art - contemporary and classical.  The result?! The End. A year of fun, hard work and learning, culminated with the "What If" exhibition at the Copeland Gallery where I exhibited 3 pieces inspired by research into depression.  

All good things should end on a high although our amazing course leader advised us not to call it "the end" but rather, "the beginning". 

The Beginning
Here I am, ready for a new start and wondering what and where to next. I am open to collaborations and will happily accept commissions. In the meantime I made a pact with myself to draw every day, even if it is for just 30 seconds. Outside of that, I enrolled on the "Drawing the Contemporary Portrait" short course at the Royal Drawing School and started this website. Please check back for updates.