A very happy Saturday to you. I hope you’ve had a good week, here are some links for your Saturday. I’m hoping for a very busy weekend and will hopefully refine some new designs for my shop, you’ll be the first to know when they become available!
Every weekend (ish) I share 5 links that I’ve seen and found interesting. I’ve been bookmarking sites like these for a while and so some of these links will be quite old. If you have seen them before this will give you the chance to revisit them or discover for the first time. I’ve certainly enjoyed going through and revisiting what I bookmarked a while ago. I find it so interesting that such things can be so easily found on the Internet but so easily lost at the same time!
*Photo taken out of the train window on my iPhone, this is how all of my photos will look soon if time continues to go this fast!*
If I write down my goals for the month, maybe I’ll do them. I’ve written monthly goals for a while now but have been scared about writing them on my blog for fear of not completing them and so having to admit failure to you all but you know what? It isn’t failure, maybe the goal just hasn’t been realistic or hasn’t been the right time. I know that we’re right in the middle of May now but better late than not at all!
So here goes:
- get all up to date with project life and other projects that I’ve started
- refine the designs that I’ve been working on for my little shop
- sketch out ideas on paper first at work, I must force myself to do this
- try my absolute best to stick to my new, improved and never completed before, blog calendar.
- during May I will try to embrace my curly hair, all my life I’ve been trying to cope with it, fight it, straighten it down and calm it. I want to be able to embrace it because with all the fighting, it’s only going to fight back! (If anyone knows and can recommend any hair products, tips or advice for curly, wavy, unruly, out-of-control hair, I would be so so SO appreciative if you mention it in the comments!)
- May’s intention: Grow at work
*Photo taken on Saturday at a BBQ in between rain showers, edited with the new “A Beautiful Mess app”*
I’ve had a few things on my mind recently and it has come around because I’ve started doing all of these new crafty and arty things and generally, being more creative and loving it. There is a bit of a long back story to this one, stretching 7 years so make sure you’re sitting comfortably and you have a big cup of tea. This has been a very hard but honest post to write.
You may or may not know that I studied an art and design foundation course when I was 18-19. I had just left school and it was a big step to being at a university, studying an arty subject, all day everyday, surrounded by other art students who were brilliant at what they do, some were older than me, some were about the same age but I mostly thought that they were all better than me at art. I took things so seriously when I was that age and found it so hard to do anything else but what I thought was Graphic Design at the time. I’d find it hard to draw anything, not because I couldn’t physically hold a pencil but because I knew it wouldn’t be good enough, what came out of my hand and the pencil wasn’t what was in my head. It was part perfectionism and partly because I wasn’t brave enough to just try something, anything!
Throughout the foundation year I tried a bit of everything, a few weeks of fine art, then 3D, photography, graphics and fashion. It was quite a whirlwind! It was all quite rushed at the beginning and all along I didn’t really “get it”. I struggled big time. My favourite part was 3D, the brief was to create a pop up card. I created a pop up of Roy Litchenstein’s “Whaam!” I struggled with it at the start but loved the result. I loved the craft side of it, and loved that once I got the hang of the pop up mechanism, it was quite simple to do and was quite effective and looked great.
I knew at the end of these different sections that I didn’t want to specialise in 3D, the pop-up card that I loved so much was mostly 2D, I knew it wasn’t what I wanted to to, it wasn’t “me.” So I decided to specialise in Graphic Design and Illustration, this is what inspired me to do an Art and Design Foundation in the first instance, I’d already made my decision before and I stuck to it.
However, I struggled throughout the rest of the year. I struggled for ideas, I struggled to get the few ideas I had out on paper. I had never used adobe photoshop before, I was vaguely familiar with adobe illustrator but no where near as familiar as the rest of the class seemed to be with photoshop and other software. There were a lot of outgoing and talented people in my class and they all seemed to be racing ahead of me with ideas, while I felt very shy, insecure and I was struggling. I worked so hard, I would work away at whatever project I was doing for hours, I’d get home late and carry on working. I know now that I was working hard but just in the wrong direction.
Fast forward to the end of that foundation year and I got the lowest mark possible, my tutor had said that I almost got the mark above but not quite, which eased the blow a little. I’d worked so hard, I was almost expecting to do a little better but deep down I knew that I had been going in the wrong direction for a while.
After a whirlwind foundation year and not quite getting the grade that I needed to get into the University that I wanted. It hit my confidence quite bad. Confidence has never been a strong point of mine. I had grown a lot during that foundation year but not quite enough.
My foundation tutor spoke to the university that I wanted to go to because it is very rare that a student would have to get anything higher than a pass on a foundation course to get onto a degree course. The tutors at Newport said that it was no problem at all and so I was relieved that I could still go to my chosen uni regardless of my mark.
So I went to university, I moved 140 miles away from home so that I didn’t have any distractions. I could be focused on university work and also on university life.
After struggling through my foundation year, I was convinced that I could do better. I wanted to show them! Not in a horrible spiteful way but I’d felt so horrible after foundation that I needed to make a difference. If I was going to University to do the same subject, I didn’t want to mope around thinking I wasn’t good enough and that I would fail because if I thought like that then it sure would happen!
I feel like I picked myself up through those three years at uni, I was driven and focused to be better, better than myself more than anything. In the first term of uni it was commented by one of my lecturers that I had tried to be too ambitious. He said this almost in a negative way, I certainly didn’t see it as a negative thing. I must have been doing something right!
I still had a niggling thought in the back of my mind that I wasn’t good enough. I guess it’s natural to think that one can do better but the low mark from my foundation year was in the back of my mind. It was making me think that maybe I’m doing all of the work correctly for the marks but the work isn’t any good and my ideas aren’t creative enough. I still struggled for ideas, I found it hard to draw out those few ideas but it was a big improvement on my work from foundation. I was also quite a perfectionist still, a lot of my work was very safe. I pushed myself but not so much. After some very hard work and focus, I managed to get a first class degree, I must have done something right, but that’s not the point of this post.
Fast forward again to now and I’ve been working as a Graphic Designer for 2 and a half years. I’ve been working through being a perfectionist and have been doing a lot of things to actively be more creative, you don’t have to search too far to find exactly what I’ve been doing on this blog. This blog being one of the things that has helped me in my quest to be more creative. I’m so much happier now that I’ve almost got around my fear of getting things wrong and just getting things done, predominantly arty things. It’s a great feeling. Creativity really is like a muscle where the more you exercise it, the better it is. I’m not saying that I’m the most creative person in the world now but I’m getting loads better.
So, it crossed my mind, I wonder what it would be like if I was to do the art and design foundation course again as I am now. It got me thinking. I don’t regret doing an art and design foundation and starting my art education when I did at all because I may not be where I am now. It’s not even a case of regretting anything, it just makes me think about if I’d done things differently. I do wonder if I was really ready for being an art student when I knew nothing about art or about my abilities.
But then, would I ever have known anything that I know now if I hadn’t taken that step? I certainly wouldn’t have the awesome friends that I met on the foundation course and at Newport. I may not have even gone to Newport! I may not have started this little blog. I certainly couldn’t have learned all of what I know now on my own.
What if my work was absolutely brilliant in my foundation course and I found it really easy to pass with a distinction? I may have gone on to university and just coasted along, not really learning anything, not driven to do anything or prove anything. I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed university half as much as I did. What if I’d travelled before the foundation course and knew a bit more about the world an about myself? (I’m really not cut out for travelling, that would have been a terrible plan!)
They say that University teaches you how to learn and I suppose that is exactly what it did. I didn’t know anything when I left uni compared to now!
I’m so glad in a way that things happened how they did, because what matters is now. It’s good to think about the past and learn from it but I don’t like to have regrets, I certainly don’t regret going to university when I did or doing a foundation. What matters is now, and now I have a degree in something I love doing, now I can sit with a pencil and a sketchbook and draw anything that I want to, not because I’m a brilliant illustrator (not at all!) but because if it goes wrong, there’s plenty more paper (and trust me I have enough way too many sketchbooks!) I have so many ideas for my little shop that I seriously need to take about a month off work to be able to implement them, I don’t think that would even be enough! Now, I’m writing on this blog a lot more regularly than last year, which is good, and I LOVE that I have this blog! Even if only a handful of people read it and just one person feels inspired, I feel I’ve done my job. And now, I’m SO glad that I don’t take things so seriously! I’ve definitely gained some perspective over the last few years, life is way too short to be worrying about whether you’re good enough.
I wonder if all of this is down to my education, my change is perspective, a change in my frame of mind, would things have happened like this anyway? Or is it just that I’ve ‘grown up’? I don’t know. But all I know is that I’m so happy that things have worked out the way that they did.
Every weekend (ish) I share 5 links that I’ve seen and found interesting. I’ve been bookmarking sites like these for a while and so some of these links will be quite old. If you have seen them before this will give you the chance to revisit them or discover for the first time. I’ve certainly enjoyed going through and revisiting what I bookmarked a while ago. I find it so interesting that such things can be so easily found on the Internet but so easily lost at the same time!
I haven’t done a Friday Finds post in a little while and I’ve decided to change it’s name from Friday Finds to “Inspired.” I felt that friday finds was running out of steam a little and there was always the pressure to make it on a Friday, it being called “Inspired” lifts that pressure and it can be anything that inspires me. Easy.
This week’s theme was going to be stripes, but whilst preparing this week’s theme, I searched “stripes” on Pinterest as a starting point. After scrolling through many many images of fashion and lifestyle shots of girls wearing stripes in a multitude of different ways. I found an image which was a bit more of what I was looking for.
It was an image by self-taught German photographer Matthias Heiderich and so I looked more into his work. After a bit of searching, I found that I loved it all! I love the colours, the shapes, the composition, the lines, the angles, everything. So here is a small selection, for a bit of inspiration on a Friday.
These images and many more found here. What have you been inspired by this week?
I know I feel like I’ve only just posted an update about my one little word project but I’m trying to be a little more organised with these things. My April intention was to “grow into myself” and I only remembered that this was the case when I looked back at my intention cards on May 1st to see how I was doing. So, as you can probably tell I didn’t make a concerted effort to “Grow into myself.”
What I mean by growing into myself is feeling comfortable in my skin, feeling comfortable in the clothes that I wear, being happy that I’m me and not comparing myself to others.
I suppose this could be seen as quite a vein intention but it’s more of an inward thing, it’s all about the way that I think, the way that I see myself and others. Without realising it, I’ve done one thing that has really help with this intention and it is that I’ve joined a yoga class again. Yoga is amazing, I can’t even start to explain how good it is! I think I will try and work on this intention a little more throughout the year but I think that I’m getting there. All of these intentions are on-going throughout the year and I’ve loved taking part in this project so far.
Photos above are from the April task for the project, find or take photos relating to your word.
I hope you’re having a good Bank Holiday Monday if you live in the UK. Today I will mostly be catching up with the ever growing list of things I want to get done and hopefully spending some time in the sunshine too. I hope it is sunny where you are and that you have a happy and productive week.
The above was drawn and photographed by myself.
I have been inspired to think of Mondays in a different way. Yes, I do wish it was still the weekend but there is absolutely nothing I can do about it so I must embrace Mondays. So therefore, I have renamed Monday “Make a difference Monday.” Embrace today, try to do something a little differently, make a difference, even if it is a small one, it all counts. You can read the explanation in the first post of the series and read the entire series here.
Hello and happy Saturday to you! I do love a link round-up post. It’s when I read these kinds of posts that I find new artists, designers and bloggers that I hadn’t even heard of before. Every weekend (ish) I’m going to share 5 links that I’ve seen and found interesting. I’ve been bookmarking sites like these for a while and so some of these links will be quite old. If you have seen them before this will give you the chance to revisit them or discover for the first time. I’ve certainly enjoyed going through and revisiting what I bookmarked a while ago. I find it so interesting that such things can be so easily found on the Internet but so easily lost at the same time!
April was a great month! It all started with getting new business cards, I’m so pleased with them and they are so colourful. Rob and I had our (nine year) anniversary, We had a very posh dinner, it was lovely. April has been the best month so far with my little greeting card shop, I sold more cards than ever, selling out of one design and being featured on the Etsy front page a couple of times. Spring sprang and we’ve had a few sunny and warm days. I visited a couple of Exhibitions with my Mum and we went shopping in Liberty’s (I didn’t buy too much, just a couple of notebooks and paperclips from the stationery room, everything else was far too expensive!)
I hope you had a good April, here’s to a happy and productive May.
I jotted these 3 things down at 11:30pm one night when I’d just been out for dinner, I’d had a lovely dinner with a friend, a small glass of wine and I had been reading about Twyla Tharp’s goals and ambitions right before bed and wondered what mine was.
What is your creative ambition?: To continually improve, so I never think ” My time may be over.”
I’m not sure if I’ve read these three things somewhere before as I see so many different quotes and sayings on Pinterest, I’m not sure what sticks in my mind subconsciously. I know this idea isn’t original but as I was lying in bed thinking about my life goals, I knew that it couldn’t be something really specific like ‘be a famous designer and write a top selling book’ or ‘earn £1,000,000 a year and move to the countryside in a little cottage with 3 children,’ you get the idea! It had to be something quite broad and quite simple, you never know what life will throw at you, so I had to be prepared for most things. These three things slowly came into my mind as I thought it over:
Love a lot
This covers a lot, love my family, love my friends, love my potential children, love what I do, love myself and others. Be loving and let myself be loved. You get the idea!
Do good work
This covers everything that I will do, whether it’s a 9-5 job, working for myself, writing my blog, doing housework, cooking dinner, being a Mum/Wife/Auntie/Grand-daughter/Grandmother/Sister/Daughter, creating a garden, raising money for charity, volunteering, whatever I do, I will do it to the absolute best of my ability. No half measures here! Also, I don’t agree with doing things for a ‘bad’ cause, I’m not sure what that means for me at the moment but I hope to do all things for the love and not for the money.
Be Happy
This may be the hardest one, but whatever life throws at me, I will choose to be happy. I will be grateful for what I have, thankful for what I have achieved and hope to have no regrets.
As a meerkat once said ‘simples, eeek!’
What do you think? Do you have any life goals like this?
Ps. I’m trying on a new blog title for size – let me know what you think, I’ll settle on one blog title for longer than a few months one day! I won’t officially change this title just yet, I’m seeing how it feels for now!
I’m a bit late with March’s update on my One Little Word project as you can see, but better late than never. My intention for March was to grow in savings. When I decided on this at the start of the year, I wasn’t quite sure what it would involve. I already save a bit of money every month so I’m not sure what I had planned to do for this month.
What I did do was take a look at how much I spend and how I could spend less. And I’ve realised, after writing myself a budget and not really looking at it throughout the month but managing to keep to it anyway, I’m doing ok. I save quite a lot, I don’t spend too much on clothes (with the exception of just last month because I needed to buy new boots and felt like I needed a few new clothes for work), I can’t possibly spend less on transport (without moving house, closer to the office), I don’t spend a lot on going out, I don’t go on too many holidays and if I do, I only spend what I’ve saved up for. Boring!
I didn’t like that intention anyway, there are more important things in life than money, it just helps sometimes and as long as I’m in no ridiculous amounts of debt, it’s fine! I suppose it’s good to know when you don’t really need to make any changes!
Onto something a bit more exciting: The task for March in the one little word classroom was to set yourself a task to do this month, break it up into small chunks and set a date for when you will complete it by. I decided that I would brainstorm new ideas for my little shop and work on their designs. I would also create a few things just for fun and creativity’s sake. I was already going to be quite busy with other things and a little holiday throughout March, so have continued with this one through April too. But let’s see how I did: I worked on 3 totally new ideas for my little shop and I completed 3 (slightly) different creative projects just for fun and started a 4th, which will be a long term ongoing project anyway. I didn’t do too badly considering I aimed to do 5 of each.
I’m looking forward to sharing them all in the near future!
Have you been working on the ‘one little word’ project? How are you getting along?
Goodness, where has the time gone? I’m ever-so sorry that I’ve been a bit quiet around here recently.
Firstly, whilst I was writing the last post about saying no a couple of weeks ago, I thought to myself that I’d take a little break over the weekend to de-stress, which I did and naturally when I said that I wouldn’t touch the blog for the weekend, I ended up thinking of a million (ish) blog post ideas and couldn’t stop writing!
Secondly, I felt a little overwhelmed by the response to my last blog post, that post got the best ever views by a mile and I felt nervous that you would all expect more of the same.
And thirdly, I woke up Monday morning last week not being able to hear a thing, the doctor said my ears were just blocked but these last two weeks, I’ve felt quite isolated by not being able to hear what anyone is saying! Two weeks later and I had a nurses appointment yesterday to sort them out, it.was.amazing! I can now hear clearer than I thought possible, everyone is so loud! I’ve never really had any problems with my ears until now and for that I am so grateful, but there was no end to my complaining about it for the last couple of weeks. I cannot imagine what life would be like for deafness and tinnitus to be a permanent thing so, again I am so grateful that the solution this time was just a quick fix.
But all that aside, as I said, I’ve got a million (ish, ok, it’s probably about 5 if I really think about it! Ha!) blog post ideas lined up and I’m looking forward to catching up on those. I’m inspired to get to work!
Photos above are from last weekend, Rob and I went for a long walk along the canal near to where we live. It was the first warm day of the year so far, so my lovely pale feet made their first appearance. The weather tried to teach me a lesson for wearing such summery shoes when it started to rain. Afterwards, we made delicious double chocolate muffins, with ‘chocolate chips’ made out of mashed up, left-over easter egg! The top middle photo is us in the middle of baking, I’ve got no make up on, rained on hair but I love our smiley happy cakey bakey faces.
