Sofa snippets #005

A musical, a birthday, starting a very long book and craving some solo travel

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!

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 been quite varied, with two scenes, a landscape, a grid day and a pattern day. There were still plenty of trees (well, four of them).

Some favourite bits from this week's Morning Ink

And the words in the Morning Ink posts included nostalgia for the days when the kids were little, a wordless day, thoughts about reading, my wishing for some solo travel time, thoughts about the pub and the nice artwork in its loos and moaning about feeling ill.¹

I did get some other personal sketchbook time in, including some drawing on the train, which is not something I usually do, but I enjoyed it quite a bit, and may well try doing so more often.

Drawing on the train with three materials - a paint marker, a Neocolor II crayon and a fountain pen. The tree and the hill were both observational. The woman and fruit bowl from my head.

I also did some sketching in the pub, while Chris was at the bar. Because I fortuitously forgot my phone. I would like to try getting this (lovely) little sketchbook out more often when I’m in some minor downtime like that, instead of automatically reaching for the phone.

Pub sketching. The proportions of the guy at the bar totally make him look like a kid. Or maybe it was the shorts. He did look quite young, to be honest. Though that probably means he was in his thirties! And the dog was not with him but I just put him with him while sketching. The dog was with a group of people at a table near us, and was very cute.

(Morning Ink is a section of my publication that goes out daily. It is not automatically switched on for you so, if you want to see those posts whenever they are sent out you’ll need to toggle them on, via Manage Subscription.)

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

I have honestly not managed to get much done this week. I’ve got a bit further with some of the pieces I’m making from trend-led briefs from my agent, but I’m finding it a little hard to do this sort of speculative work without the framework of regular deadlines. I do really need to finish some more of it next week.

Here’s one of the beetles I’ve been working on, next to a beetle that I drew a good few years ago. Can you tell which is which?

And I did one more pattern for the pattern challenge and then apparently let that fall by the wayside.

Shell pattern for Melanie Johnson’s summer pattern challenge. I only made two patterns and then stopped!

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.

Work has mostly been copy-editing a History textbook, which is really enjoyable. I love history and this one is on some really interesting subjects and includes quite a lot of bits about everyday life, which I far prefer to wars and big-picture history, though I appreciate both kinds are important. There was also little Spanish bits and bobs and some building of digital resources. And lots of fighting with a variety of tech issues, which I tend to get ridiculously anxious about. Oh, and a whole day off on Thursday! And then working on the weekend, including today - if I can push my feeling ill away enough to do.

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

I finished reading The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante and started reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, which Chris recently finished reading. If you don’t know, it’s huge - 1474 pages, and I’ve only got to page 47 so far! I think I’ll be reading it for some time. I finished listening to Where the Crawdads Sing on Friday and caught up with The Archers on BBC Sounds and then moved back to Mansfield Park on Spotify. I don’t think I listened to any podcasts last week.

TV-wise I watched the latest (and I am pretty sure the last of the season) episode of The Buccaneers and binged the rest of Sirens. I also watched the first episode of Season 2 of Wednesday, on Netflix.

And then the biggest culture thing last week was getting the train to Bristol and seeing Moulin Rouge at Bristol Hippodrome. It finished there yesterday and the next place the tour is going is Manchester from 20 August to 4 October. If you have a chance to see it, do go. It was very good.

This is the Substack section - Substack posts or publications that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past week.

I changed some of my subscriptions to annual paid subscriptions this week, because I think I prefer it that way, especially when the annual subscription isn’t too much. I then don’t have to think about it for a while. I still have a handful of weekly ones, either because the annual is just too big an outlay or because I’m only subscribing briefly to access some specific posts.

Oh, I did listen to a couple of podcast episodes - from The Visual Edit.

2 - The imperfect line

1 - Am I good enough?

You should give them a listen.

I have also been enjoying a couple of non-illustration substacks this week - Philippa Perry, who I always loved reading on The Guardian. I think she always has some good advice to give and the collector of everyday life stories in me (who may one day call herself a writer again) really enjoys reading about the issues and problems people are going through (I think some people would describe that as nosy, but I like to think of it as interested!), as well as Lindsey Mackereth, who writes about neurocomplexity, which is very interesting to me on many different levels.

I have some free trials for both of these to give away, so let me know if you’d like me to gift them to you. First come first served.

And a couple of interesting kidlit posts, too.

Designing Characters: Tips from a Kidlit Illustrator

Brushes I use and How to use them!

This is the food section - meals I cooked, new food I tried, places I ate out, and other food-related bits and pieces.

I made a

Some of the meals from this week. (Yes, I do mostly like to use that new bowl and take photos of food in it!)

I made a vegan quiche last Sunday, with roast potatoes and a side salad (the side salad was one Chris had made the day before). I use tofu, nutritional yeast, miso paste, some cashews and sunflower seeds and black salt to make the vegan quiche filling. I have made it this way to make frittatas before and I do think I prefer them to the quiche, as the pastry just makes it a bit too heavy. It was still very nice, though, and much easier to eat in a pastry case. The filling was leeks and grated courgette. I think I also prefer it when I use chunks of vegetables.

Other food I made through the week includes spicy tomato and sausage pasta (which was not as good as usual as I made too much pasta), kimchi tofu fried rice (to which I added a lot of vegetables, including carrot, tomatoes, broccoli, napa cabbage and edamame beans. And then yesterday I made my vegan mac and cheese (using soy cream, leeks, nutritional yeast, vegetable bouillon and some miso paste). It does hit the comfort food spot that I always look for in a mac and cheese (without including any actual cheese). And there’s some left to soothe me through a day of feeling ill and trying to get some work done.

In Bristol, we went for lunch at their Ritorno Lounge. Love the Lounges - their decor is so very much my cup of tea, and I like their food and the large variety of vegan and veggie options they provide. I had a vegan avocado toast, which was lovely, and a berry smoothie.

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

We had a birthday in the house this week. Our eldest turned 19. We did still get to do the morning present-opening, which was nice (though coming at it from teenagers having not gone to bed yet, rather than getting up at silly o’clock like they did on birthdays and Christmas when they were little!).

And Chris and I have both been researching ways for each of us to get away on our own for a bit. Walking in the countryside is calling him. City breaks and trains are calling me. I have a couple of 5-days-in-a-month interrail passes that need using up (or refunding) by late November. There are no passholder Eurostar fares available this month (they always go very quickly in summer months), but there are in the autumn, so I should really book those as soon as possible and then work the rest of it out afterwards, rather than waiting until the last minute and finding that all the passholder fares have gone.

I could also refund the passes and do something else instead, whether somewhere in the UK or taking a cheap flight (absolutely not my preferred option, for many reasons). And I also need to work out whether to go when I still have work booked in and do some work and some exploring, or whether to book something in the as-yet-unfilled weeks and then somehow keep the time unbooked with work. I would definitely like to build myself a creative retreat where I do lots of sketchbook work and inspiration exploring and resting and reading. But I do also appreciate being able to juggle some work with some exploring, as I tend to feel less guilty and also the structure of having work to do helps me a lot.

And, of course, I get to think about where to go! I was assuming France, Spain, Italy or Portugul, to be honest. They are my happy places/comfort places/home from home. But my youngest suggested I should go somewhere different, like Serbia or Bulgaria. And a little part of me did wonder about Scandinavia. I feel it’s most likely I will default to the Med, though.

I will try to fix on something this week, though, so that I have something to look forward to and to carry me through a busy(ish) few weeks ahead.

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).

1. A reminder that I post my Morning Ink drawings every day, usually accompanied by some words of some kind, often just little bits on what happened the day before or plans for that day, sometimes ponderings on what I’ve listened to that morning and sometimes just completely random thoughts. This does not go out automatically to subscribers (because most people do not want daily emails cluttering their inboxes), so if you do want to receive my Morning Ink posts every single day you will need to (1) be a subscriber and (2) toggle Morning Ink on.

What it should look like if you want all my main posts and the different sections delivered to you. (Everyday Life isn’t currently one I’m using, but might be in the future.)