Welcome to Morning Ink, where I share my daily fountain pen drawing and whatever thoughts (sometimes none, mostly reasonably short, occasionally long and very rambling) jump out and onto the screen. If you don’t want daily emails you can toggle them off by going to Manage subscription – just turn Morning Ink off, no need to fully unsubscribe!1
I spent most of yesterday testing out some changes to my portfolio website. Veering from frustration at the inflexibility of the themes I tried to joy when I worked out how to tweak some code. I am determined to finish it today and implement it on the actual site (I have a testing site for trying things out so that I don’t break everything while playing).
I realised that this sort of thing, along with other business admin and planning, requires a particular type of brain power. One that I do have, but only to a certain amount in any given day or week. And that deeper, more logical brain power is almost always taken up by a combination of publishing work (especially project management or development editing) and household and family financial management and emotional labour.
As well as finding, or carving out, the time to do this type of thing for the illustration business, as well as the publishing one, I also need the right headspace. Making, taking, time to draw is not an issue. It’s the rest of it that is. So, I’m going to need to work out what to do about that.
I made a nice curry last night. Cauliflower, chickpea and spinach. And finished watching This Is Us. And tried to get an early night, but somehow still didn’t get to sleep until about half eleven.
Thanks so much for being here. Your presence on its own is a joy, but I love to hear from you, too, so please do feel free to leave a comment. About something that has resonated for you in today’s picture or in today’s words. Or about something completely unrelated. Tell me about your morning, your creative practice, your particular work or life juggling act. Anything. If you want to go even further you can take out a paid subscription – if you’re happy to give me your postal address I'll send you some art of some kind in the post.
And if you don’t like subscriptions (I totally get it!) you can ‘tip me’ instead. But really, your presence and comments are the best rewards – if they could be exchanged for food and electricity, I’d be so very happy.
