Sofa snippets #010
More birds, cactuses, pivoting back to vegetarian, not being able to get into a book and so very much looking forward to a trip away next week
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.
There has been a lot of using my Morning Ink to draw elements or ideas for the weekly piece I am working on for the agency’s Talent Tap challenge that is running currently. This week the theme is routed in the ‘wild west’ (of North America), and I went off down the desert route, so there are some cactuses and some desert birds, because I found I didn’t want to let go of drawing birds quite yet.
There were three grids, including a triangle one with lots of mark-making mindfulness. And yesterday I finished my sixth Morning Ink sketchbook.
And today I started my seventh, but took the big (little?) step to change from an A5 to an A6 sketchbook. The idea is for the Morning Ink practice to take a little less time out of my mornings, but I am sure I will find a way to stretch the time out, even on a smaller canvas. Today was very quick, though, with just a few leaves (feeling the autumn vibes). And I’m kind of hoping that I might be able to train myself to just draw one thing per day most days.
(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.
This week started off with my head still fairly full of birds. Actually, as mentioned in the Morning Ink section, it still hasn’t fully let go of them. So I worked up one of the bird sketches I had from the last theme. I really loved the storytelling element here and I will be using my upcoming break, I hope, to dig in a fair bit more into storytelling to see if I can move some picture book ideas forward. I have this idea of myself that I don’t have a good imagination. This stems to a large extent from something a teacher said on a report card decades ago and my sketchbooks (Morning Ink and others) are helping me to realise that this actually might not be true and I should allow myself to explore this side more before dismissing myself as unimaginative.
As well as that, I have been working on a mini collection with a wild west theme and here’s one of the pieces for that.
I need to finish up a bit more on the other pieces that go with this today and then tomorrow will get to find out what the next theme is. I really find it helpful to have a weekly schedule. I would love to be able to keep that going when there isn’t an ongoing challenge or similar to work to.
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.
Freelancing work involved completing two projects. I managed to do a few days with longer hours at the start of the week. And ended on a full day, just finishing at the very end of the day. This was a week that I had fully been intending to be mostly free for cleaning, tidying and painting the staircase. A week or two of slightly longer hours prior to last week would have made that entirely possible. But I will absolutely stretch work into empty spaces, because… I don’t know, because it’s familiar, because it’s easy? I would really love to be able to take a week or two off and be at home and get lots of DIY done, as well as reading and relaxing in my own home. But I genuinely do not seem to be able to that. Every single time I have a block of time that I can afford to keep work-free and think of all the fulfilling things I can do, I stretch work out into it instead.
So, I am going away to get a proper break.
This is the culture section - mostly what I’ve been reading, but might also include TV and film and wider culture, too.
I finished James by Percival Everett and also finished listening to Mi Amice Geniale (My Brilliant Friend) I continued listening to Andrea Levy’s Small Island, and started Jazz by Toni Morrison, but have been completely unable to get into it (I finished James on Sunday, I am pretty sure and am only on page 11 of Jazz a full week later!), so think I may need to switch to something else. I may just not be in the right frame of my mind for it right now. I also caught up on The Archers and listened to The Illustration Department episode with Martina Flor, which I really enjoyed and that took me off to explore her podcast, which I hadn’t known about and which has a lot of episodes to explore.
TV… I have mostly still been watching This is Us, with a smattering of (not the new season, do not spoil, please) Only Murders in the Building, which Chris and I are watching together. We have one episode left of the season before the new one, which we are going to try to watch before I go away on Tuesday and save the new one for when I’m back.
This is the Substack section - Substack posts or publications that I’ve particularly enjoyed over the past week.
A few posts I’ve enjoyed on Substack this last week (I am continuing to be annoyed that these embeds don’t show the picture from the post, because much of what I read on here is to do with art! It shows the picture when you share a note, why not for a post? Grrrr.):
This is the food section - meals I cooked, new food I tried, places I ate out, and other food-related bits and pieces.
The main thing that happened foodwise was that I pivoted back to being vegetarian not vegan. I thought this would happen before I went to France, to be honest. I don’t think I’ve made anything especially interesting this week, though. I did make aubergine pasta on Friday, which is my eldest’s favourite dish that I make, so it was nice to make it for her final night here. And I did enjoy a really nice shiitake mushroom omelette that Chris made me on Thursday night, served with roasted baby potatoes and salad. I’m really looking forward to cooking today, as my sister is coming to visit and I love cooking for her. I do feel some wistfulness for the times when my parents were still here, and close by and my sister lived close by and they would come for meals, because they always enjoyed them a lot and because then I could cook the quantities I tend to cook and not have to eat the same dish myself for the next two or three days because there’s no-one else eating it. Going back to vegetarian means that I will be cooking a lot more things that the two (!!) other people in the house might eat.
I’m interested to see what I’ll eat in Strasbourg. I have cooking facilities, so I will probably mostly cook for myself, but I do like to have at least one or two lunches or snacks while out exploring. I guess I should try a tarte flambee (it looks like there are usually plenty of veggie versions available, though when I was researching I found that there were vegan restaurants offering vegan tarte flambees, too).
This last section is for general other stuff - things you might talk about over a cuppa at the kitchen table.
I am very very ready for my trip and getting lots of train journeys in and seeing a few countries, and general filling my inspiration bucket right up. I am trying really really hard not to expect to get loads of anything else done, but my head is definitely full of things I’d love to do, but would need a month away, not a week! Writing and thumbnailing picture books. Rejigging my website. Taking a bunch of sketches to final. Sorting out some of my Morning Ink to share on social media and my website in a way that might elicit some commissions for black and white fountain pen art of some kind for some applications. Embracing mock-ups and showing how my work can be useful to clients in different markets. Preparing some social media posts to showcase that, too. Planning out a book about briefing freelancers. Setting up a new fancy budget monitoring spreadsheet that will make me dig even further into my new finance plans and organisation. Reading five or six books….
But it’s the relaxing, exploration and inspiration-bucket-filling that absolutely needs to take priority. Anything else is a bonus, not a requirement.
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).
So excited to see you soon ☺️❤️🧡💛💚💙💜