Can I please do ALL THE THINGS?

aka the creative mind

I have a page full of notes on things to draw and ideas to look into and people to contact (or research) after a half-hour planning sit down today.

Anyone else (I’m 100% certain I’m not alone) have way too many different directions they are being pulled in?

I am feeling called more to children’s illustration, after spending a year(ish) convinced I would mostly be working on grown-up illustration (grown-up sounds less dodgy than ‘adult’, right?). I’ve also been almost entirely drawing patterns and pattern motifs in my creative time recently and feel very much called to get back to doing a lot of that. And then food illustration is also shouting very loudly and telling me I should create a set of printable illustrated recipes. Which then made me think about printable houseplant sheets with lovely illustrations and also useful information on. And book covers! Book covers look like they could be so much fun.

Can I please just do ALL THE THINGS?

The image is of some Portuguese tiles. I was on a 5-week interrailing trip in March (and a bit of February and bit of April, because y’know, March doesn’t have a full five weeks in it). In Portugal, I only managed a few days in Lisbon, and not the visits to Faro and Porto I was hoping to include, but that’s OK as this was a tasting-board for future travels. Oh my goodness, though, the tiles in Portugal! They are everywhere. Pretty much every tiny train station we passed through had different tiles on their buildings. So many buildings throughout Lisbon were covered in tiles. And then indoors, too, there were loads.

I didn’t really do any travel sketching while I was on my trip. I thought I would do a lot. But mostly all I did was pages of go-with-the-flow painted patterns and a very few loose sketches. Which is also fine, because I was soaking everything up and filling my head with lots of inspiration.

So… another thing on my big list of ‘things to draw’ is some aspirational travel-inspired illustrations – my notes say ‘to attract ad agencies’, but really it’s on the list because they will be fun to draw (though obviously if they do also attract ad agencies, I won’t be disappointed).

I hereby predict that I get sucked into busy busy client work as of Monday morning and do literally NONE OF THE THINGS.