Sofa snippets #002

drawing, tracking time, gender stereotypes, vegan food and how much to share about our kids’ lives online

Hello and welcome to Sofa Snippets, a weekly roundup of bits and bobs from my life and work.

If you’re reading this in your email inbox, it might be too long and you might be prompted to read it on the website. Sorry!

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This section is mostly about what my Morning Ink practice has shown me this week, and sometimes other general sketchbook insights.

This week’s Morning Ink has included two trees, three women (two of them in photo frames), three mugs, a fruit bowl, two scenes, eight cats, a dragonfly, a fox, one getting the day of the week wrong (most common mistake is mixing up Tuesday and Thursday - it would be so much easier if they didn’t start with the same letter), and lots of tiles and pattern.

Favourite Morning Ink bits from this week.

I do really love drawing little household scenes. They’re usually only very loosely inspired by our house and my life, and just involve elements that I want to draw in the moment. I’d love to have a whole week of these little scenes. But… I am very much committed to letting each day’s page be what comes out of my head and my hand on that day. I feel that the minute I try to pressure myself to a specific run of something, I’ll lose the will to keep up with the practice. So, there will only be a week of little scenes if that’s what my head and hand want to do every day in a given week. And, yes, this does mean that there are many many repeat motifs and themes that come up because sometimes it’s the easiest and most familiar thing that is what wants to come out first thing in the morning. But I think there’s a lot of joy and power in that, actually. It focuses on how I draw particular things and I think helps me to centre my visual language and identity, while still allowing for experimentation and new things and themes to creep in.

But I will be very happy if I happen to get a run of scenes soon, even if not a whole week of them.

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This section is what I’ve been doing illustration business wise - drawing, outreach, and so on.

Again, a lot of curation of existing work this week. You should get to find out why in August. And quite a bit of drawing food, most of which I can’t show you, but here’s a little snippet (already shared on Notes, so you may have seen it before).

A little snippet from this week’s drawing work

It’s nice to be doing some food illustration. I did such a lot of it last year with The Illustrated Plant Kitchen and loved it, but I also got a bit tired of it and writing about food. I do love having a dedicated theme to draw and focus on for a chunk of time, and being able to focus on it for a while (book illustration is great for this, and being paid to draw something for a chunk of time definitely helps me, though I would love it to not be such a pull!), but I definitely have a point at which the focus goes and I start to jittery and wanting to draw something else.

Oh, and the other thing I did was miss the Spoonflower challenge deadline.

My non entry into last week’s Spoonflower challenge

I honestly think this is a good thing, because I had completely lost the passion of doing these that I had at the start of the year and they had very much become a chore that I put off until the very last moment. (I did make the deadline, but spotted some of those annoying white lines when I proofed it, and the fix uploaded 1 minute after the deadline.) I may well still enter some of the challenges, but I’ll stick to the ones that truly call to me and where I feel I can create something that I love. Because I’m honestly going to busy with regular illustration and pattern design for the next six months and hopefully longer and committing to entering every Spoonflower challenge this year was more about keeping those muscles exercised. If they’re being exercised elsewhere there’s no point keeping up with that purely for the sake of it.

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This section is about freelancing life, including what I’ve been working on with my educational publishing hat on and just general bits about working from home in a self-employed capacity.

The work week was about 4/5 ed pub and 1/5 art biz and I did a total of around 30 hours. I’ve been tracking my time lately. I went through a few weeks of ridiculously granular time tracking, in May and June, where I was tracking all my time in 15 minute chunks. I stopped because I felt like it was a bit crazy and because I felt like I was spending too many chunks of time on tracking time! But… I am realising that during that time I also wasted a lot less time on zoning out in social media scrolls and I have been slipping a little bit more back into that. So maybe I need an easier and more efficient way of doing the tracking.

A screenshot of my crazy super granular tracking spreadsheet

I really wanted to make it colour coded in some way, but I couldn’t find a way that worked for me. Surely there’s an app that would do something like this and could spit out a pretty picture showing me how my days are broken up?

If you know of a good time tracking app that can go this granular, or use one, please do share it! 

What I’m doing now, though, is just logging the time I spend on project work in both the businesses. Which is showing me that I really don’t work as hard as I think I do! Which is a useful thing to know, I guess.

I think I made slightly under my weekly target but, as Chris pointed out to me yesterday, a lot of the art business work is future potential income, so I might have actually made a lot more but just don’t know it yet. I have not fixed my money mindset to understand that yet and still feel bad that I made only 90% of weekly target, even though it’s still comfortably within my minimum.

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This is the culture section - mostly what I’ve been reading, but might also include TV and film and wider culture, too.

I did finish reading Cleopatra and Frankenstein last Sunday. I really really really loved that book. Please go read it, if you haven’t.

And tell me what you thought of it, if you have read Cleopatra and Frankenstein. 

I started reading The Story of a New Name - the second in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Series. This is, I am pretty sure, my third read of this one. I’ve read My Brilliant Friend at least five times, I think.

Does anyone else have the tendency to reread the first in a book series (or rewatch the first season of a TV show, actually) more times than the others? 

Because I’ve also watched the TV adaptation since the last read, I’m coming at slightly differently, I think, and I’m getting flashes of the actors come up in my head, overlaying the images I had built before seeing the TV adaptation. I’m enjoying it, though haven’t sped through incredibly fast, as I thought I might have.

I’ve almost finished The First Woman audiobook, that I’m mostly listening to while doing my Morning Ink. I am pretty sure I’ll finish this today, as I’ll listen to it while doing some drawing work I need to get done today. I have loved listening to this book. It got me thinking and I wrote quite a ramble about how I remember books that I have read, in yesterday’s Morning Ink post.

I have also been listening to The Gendered Brain and an interesting section about colour preferences. A lot of what this book shows is just how much stereotypes and socialisation impact us. And from what an early age it does so. But it also shows that it is very possible to subvert these stereotypes and retrain our brains. We are not naturally good at much (and women are absolutely not naturally good at housework, nor are men naturally bad at it!), so we can make ourselves good at what we want to be good at. Which I think those of us who consistently show up to practise illustration and other creative practices probably know deep down.

Do you feel that your creative skills are innate or down to hours and hours of practice? And what do your non-creative friends and family think?

On Thursday I listened to the latest The Illustration Department podcast, while drawing, which was all about Substack, with Adam Ming and Jason Chatfield, which was interesting.

Saturday

I am really not watching masses of TV at the moment. I have watched some Buccaneers and some This is Us and I have also watched a couple of Smosh YouTube videos with my daughter. I am pretty sure I haven’t watched any films this week, nor have I been to any exhibitions.

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I was introduced to a new Substack publication this week, via InkyGoodness, written by art director, illustrator and children’s book author, Sarah Williamson. You might like her work, if you don’t know her already.

And a few more publications my Substack History shows I’ve read this week…

This feeds into what I’ve been reading about (listening to) with The Gendered Brain:

The Most Essential Work in the World Is Still the Least Valued

I still have plenty of (educational publishing) work to do over the summer, but we do get some slower periods and it’s a great idea to have plans for them and ways to embrace them and not panic.

My slow season survival guide

This has some great tips for drawing crowds. I have not yet had to draw any crowds (or, at least, I can’t remember having to), but it’s something I would really like to experiment with, so I think I’ll be having a play with her tips and maybe looking around for other crowd-drawing tips or examples. (Feel free to throw some ideas at me.)

Sunday Spread 25: how to draw crowds

(This one’s paid, and I highly recommend paying for Jacob’s posts. He has a wealth of interesting and inspiring material and writes very well.)

Selling a Story

Adam’s monthly check-in. If you don’t subscribe to Ten Minute Artist (surely you do already?) then I highly recommend it.

July Check In - Building Pipes

Oh my goodness. Another one where Amie seems to just pull my thoughts straight out of my head. And, while it’s not framed that way, an absolute call out for a Universal Basic Income. I strongly believe this will come into being at the very least within our daughters’ lifetimes if not our own.

I Want to Get Paid Just for Being Alive

Hmmm…. maybe I should add in a separate section in these Sofa Snippets posts for Substack shares.

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This last section is for general other stuff - things you might talk about over a cuppa at the kitchen table.

This is odd, because I realise most of what I want to say here is about our daughters and parenting stuff and I can’t share that because it is their lives to decide how and when they share about them online. Sometimes I’ll mention a tiny something and sometimes I feel I can come at it from the direction of how I feel as a parent, rather than what they have done. But mostly I don’t write about them (any more - I did a lot of that when they were little!), so it might seem like I’m not a parent or that they are not important to me, when in fact they are very important to me.

Do you try to keep your children’s lives out of your online writing, if you have children? Or are you happy to share it? Do you get permission from them or do they have a veto, if there’s something they’re particularly concerned about?

Food, I can definitely talk about, though… I made roasted vegetable and chickpea sauce with quinoa on Monday (I think it was Monday), aubergine pasta on Wednesday and homemade pizza yesterday. Thursday evening I had freezer food, though I had eaten leftover pasta for breakfast, lunch and a late afternoon snack, so really probably didn’t need that! Friday evening I had the M&S Plant Kitchen Spinach and Cannellini Bean Ravioli with olive oil and pine nuts and side salad. It’s the best vegan stuffed pasta I have found so far.

I have been strongly thinking about stopping being vegan and going back to being a vegetarian who mostly eats plant-based food. I feel like the focus on being vegan has led me to add a lot more ultra processed food into my diet (like the freezer food, and vegan ice cream, for example) and that’s led me to be more inclined to just pick up a big packet of crisps or bag of sweets. Being vegan doesn’t automatically make them healthy somehow, but it seems that’s what my head (or stomach) has been thinking more and more. Last year I was almost entirely eating healthy home cooked fresh food, the vast bulk of which happened to be vegan, but wasn’t exclusively so. I was also eating good butter and good cheese and nice free range eggs and cultured yoghurts and kefirs. Weirdly, going fully vegan seems to have made me less healthy and I’ve been putting on weight. That said, every time I think I’ll change, I don’t. Like last night. I absolutely could have put mozzarella on my pizza, but I didn’t, I put (another ultra processed product, full of coconut oil which isn’t good for you in such high quantities) vegan cheese. I wonder if I’m gone so long that I can’t go back and instead need to focus more on getting back to more regularly making delicious home-cooked, nutritious food that also happens to be vegan. Watch this space, anyway.

Talking of putting weight on… I asked my doctor if I qualified for the weight loss injections, but I’d need to be about 20kg heavier and have another couple of chronic illnesses. I am considering paying for them. But I think I need to give myself at least another few weeks on focusing on cutting out some of the ultra-processed vegan products and also getting back to walking a lot more and doing more yoga. I haven’t had ice cream in the evening for a few days and already the scales are going in the other direction, so maybe I don’t need them.

I’d love to hear from you if you’ve tried the injections, or if you have thoughts and experiences about ultra-processed or super high fat vegan products. 

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You may have noticed, I’ve added in questions to you in the ‘code block’ style.

I really love hearing from my readers, so if you have anything to say on any of the questions, or other thoughts that today’s Sofa Snippets have sparked, please do jump into the comments, or hit Reply. 

I hope you enjoy this weekly roundup format. I will still be writing some ‘proper’ posts on individual topics, but I enjoy reading these and it will keep me regularly showing up in your inbox (it has a section of its own, though, so you can untoggle it if you prefer, by going to Manage subscription).