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Last year I wrote a post about starting to find my style and the lovely Asti left a comment asking if I’d ever shared my style inspirations, and it got me thinking. I have shared artists I love in the past, but I’ve never done a post about the ones who’ve had a real impact on how I work on a more personal level.

So here are a few of the names that spring to mind when I think of my artist inspirations.

 

Tallulah Fontaine

I’ve spoken about my love for Tallulah’s work before, so I won’t spend too much time gushing here. There’s a certain tender quality to her watercolours, which although I’m not a painter I want to incorporate into my own work. Her characters are always very simply drawn but hold themselves in a such a way that they really do appear to have genuine emotions of their own.

Jean-Michel Tixier

I think Jean-Michel is a more obvious influence on my work. His character illustrations always remind me of a modern Hergé. I love the way he creates playful interactions on a page using line in a way that feels quite bold without ever being static. When I first started adding colour to my own work, his illustrations were the first place I looked for inspiration because his work felt so familiar but just with something more that I’m trying to put my finger on, so it made the jump into colour that bit easier.

 

Neva Hosking

While you can certainly see Matt Blease’s influence in the work I share here, it might be slightly less clear as to why I’ve chosen Neva Hosking as a big inspiration for my work. Her detail rich pen drawings and etchings are very different to my digital work but I love how she uses line to create texture and depth within her work. It’s been something I’ve been working on more in my sketches and that I’m starting to try and incorporate in my digital. Her work is just quite simply stunning though. Her sleeping series is magical, dreamy even if you’ll allow me the pun.

 

Matt Blease

Matt’s distinctive line drawings were a huge influence on my work when I first started to illustrate digitally. I think you can definitely see it more in my earlier work. He’s also the reason I use a slightly off-white background in my images to give them a little warmth and to make them feel slightly less digital. His work is clear and confident, in part because of their very minimal style which requires a certain decisiveness in their creation but also because of their matter of fact statements. Everything Matt seems to draw says something, whether that’s a statement, observation or just a great visual pun.

 

Bijou Karman

Over the past year I’ve slowly become more and more interested in fashion illustration and colour, as well as moving back out of digital as a medium, Bijou Karman is a huge force behind those changes. She’s even inspired me to start having a play with gouache because she makes it look so fun.  As you might have been able to tell, what often draws me to an artist is their use of line. Bijou adds detail, particularly around the eyes of her characters, using line in a way that really enhances their character but also makes her images look very distinctive. She also uses coloured line in a way I find really refreshing. In fact, the way she uses colour in general is refreshing, especially as someone who mainly works in monotone. Her paintings are bright and have so much depth, so many layers of interest, without ever feeling overwhelming or hard to look at – the portrait focal point she creates is so strong.

Other honourable mentions:

 

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So, at the start of the year I announced a few changes that you’re going to see coming into play throughout the next few months on this blog and also in my work more generally.

I’ve made those changes because in 2018 I want to really find some more focus in my work. I feel like last year I laid a lot of groundwork, I got my hands dirty, but in order to grow I need a focus to grow towards. In order to achieve a goal you need to know what that goal is*. That meant doing some serious thinking at the start of this year.

Having a focus or purpose behind your work is often described as this moment of divine inspiration. You just need to “find your niche” or “follow your passion”. For me at least, it hasn’t been that simple. I’m interested in lots of things, and I don’t know that I have an automatic “niche” especially within my non-blog work.

So, I decided to set myself some homework, in the same way that I would for a client. Now that I’ve done it myself, and seen what works, I thought I’d share it with you in case anyone else hasn’t had their purpose just leap out and grab them, or if you just want to have a bit of a refresh and remind yourself what it is you’re trying to do.

I wrote out the 8 questions below out on cue cards and did my best to answer them. I used cue cards to give me something physical to work on because I always like to have a tangible outcome. Using individual cards also meant I could switch around the order, and answer the ones I knew first and then move onto the harder ones. I divided my cards down the middle so I could answer the questions for the blog and my personal work separately, but you could also go with a project per set of cards.

While they’re only simple questions, don’t be fooled into thinking that answering them is a quick or easy task. It took me a good chunk of time to work out what the best answer to each one of them was.

I’ve put my answers below each of the questions to give you a bit of an idea as to how you might answer, and to keep me honest.

1. What do I want to get out of this?

  • Share my learnings and encourage others to pursue their creative interests
  • Establish myself as a thought leader around design, creativity and productivity
  • Add depth/credibility to my design and illustration practice

2. Who is my audience?

  • Essentially people like me
  • People interested in learning more about design/creativity
  • Young professional women mostly

3. How do I want my work to make people feel?

  • Informed
  • Empowered
  • Like they have a slightly different take on the world around them

4. What can I offer?

  • Illustrated blog posts – something more editorial compared to a lot of lifestyle blogs
  • Insight into my dual roles
  • My experience as a junior illustrator/service designer
  • Researched editorial content – use my English degree
  • Curation of the wild web

5. What are my core values?

  • Honesty
  • Consideration – work that’s thoughtful
  • Inclusivity

6. What is the personality of my work?

  • Credible
  • Friendly
  • Straightforward

7. How do I want my work to be known?

  • As smart and good to look at

8. Can you sum that all up succinctly?

I want to create work that’s considered and well easy on the eye, which encourages people to see design in the world around them.

 

Now that I’ve put some work into finding a focus for my work. I’m going to try and anchor everything I do to that purpose, because it’s a big one. So, every blog post I write, every time I take on some work around this platform, every time I start to think about a new social media series I’m going to ask myself how does this link to my mission statement?

I might even pin it up in massive lettering above my desk so I can’t avoid it.

*By the way, in all of this it’s also 100% okay if your end goal in your blogging or creative outlet is just to have fun. In fact, it’s super useful to identify that, so you can use it as a reminder not to take on anything you’re not going to have fun doing or get something enjoyable out of at the end.

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The Other Mrs Walker by Mary Paulson-Ellis was my Christmas read. It’s the perfect curl up in front of the fire while it’s cold outside novel with its mix of detective-esque plotline, Edinburgh scenery and what can only be described as Call the Midwife vibes. 

After Mrs Walker dies alone in a cold Edinburgh flat on a snowy Christmas night, a glass of whiskey dropped from her hand and the remanence of a clementine on her side board, Margaret Penny gets the job of finding out who she was through the Office for Lost People. Margaret has returned home a lost herself, middle-aged without a career, a relationship or a life she can call her own. But what Margaret Penny doesn’t realise, is just how entangled her own life will become in the death of this dead old lady.

However, The Other Mrs Walker not quite so simple as just being a mystery. The plot jumps back and forth between 2011 and the 1940s-60s, and between Margaret and a group of three sisters Clementine, Ruby and Barbara. That kind of split-plot is something I would have normally avoided in the past, but here it works well. The jumps are well defined, and you always have a clear sense of where you are and which character you’re with, and all of the strands of the plot feed into each other and inform the narrative. 

Female characters – mothers, daughters, and sisters – dominate the pages. Their relationships are fraught and complex, but never over-complicated. They’ve each got their strengths and flaws, but they’re all a little too mysterious to be fully “rounded”. It is a novel of real women though, to the extent that I would have been surprised had it not been written by a woman.

I’ve read a lot of crime thrillers and detective novels in my time and I’m not sure this will go down as one of the greatest I’ve read. The reader sometimes knows too much, and the resolutions don’t always feel quite satisfying enough. But, it is “a detective story with no detective” and in that category, it’s pretty strong.

If you’re looking for a cozy page-turner to ease you into the new year, then The Other Mrs Walker should definitely be on your considerations list.

For this month’s alternative cover I chose to highlight one of the recurring symbols in the book – the clementine. I had a lot of fun playing with textures and a slightly rougher illustration style than I normally use.

 

SOME QUESTIONS TO PONDER AS YOU READ

  • Symbols repeat themselves quite frequently throughout the novel, what do you think the effect of this is? How well do you think this is done?
  • There’s a lot of reference to family heirlooms (prized or not) do you have anything you would want to pass on to a loved one?
  • The action of The Other Mrs Walker is driven by a set of female characters, how do you think the story would play out differently if it were about fathers, sons and brothers?
  • What social commentary can you draw from how the mentally ill and the dead are treated in the story?

 IF YOU WANT SOME FURTHER READING TRY…

IF YOU WANT MORE BOOKS LIKE THIS HAVE A LOOK AT…

  • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
  • Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone
  • Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue

 

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I know we’re already in mid-January, but I know I, at least, am still trying to organize my life and get on track for 2018. One of the tools I’ve been using to do that is the Kanban board I set up towards the end of last year. So, I thought I’d tell you a little bit about it, and why it can be such a useful way of managing tasks.

WHAT’S A KANBAN BOARD?

A Kanban board is a productivity tool that allows you to visualize your workflow and all of the tasks you have to manage. It’s often used by teams (I learned about them at work) but they can work just as well if you’re a one-person band.

The idea was developed by Toyota in the 40s, as part of their revolutionalisation of manufacturing. As a side note, there’s a great This American Life about Toyota’s approach to productivity that’s well worth a listen if you’re interested in this kind of thing.

Workers in the Toyota factory would use coloured cards to display where they were in a process and to let their other team members what was ready and what was needed, and, perhaps most importantly where the process was getting stuck. This process has since been adopted by other factories, as well as industries like software design and human resource management because it allows teams to visualize their work and manage the flow of tasks.

In practice a Kanban board is just a board, whether that’s digital or physical, divided vertically into stages of a process e.g. to do, doing and done. The board is then populated by cards including the details of a task what it is, who’s doing it etc. These cards are then moved through the stages of the process as they are completed.

HOW DO I USE MINE?

I have a very simple physical Kanban board. It’s just some washi tape and post-it notes.

Mine has four stages: to do, doing, done and a backlog of things that need to be pulled in in the future. These are then divided into two lanes, hygiene, and development.

Hygiene tasks – these are things I have to do but are basically admin e.g. queuing posts

Development tasks – these are things that take more work which help me develop those might be commissions because they’re good practice and help get my work out there or courses or just an illustration for fun.

I also colour code my tasks: blue for recurring work (e.g. blog posts), pink for one-offs (e.g. commissions), yellow for anything super important. Then I add the date the work has to be finished, so I don’t forget if it’s a one-off. 

I review what’s up there on a Sunday night, and see how I’ve done, what needs to be pulled in, and what should come off the wall.

I personally find it really useful to see all of the tasks I have for the week out visually and to physically move them through the process. It’s so satisfying to pull a post-it down. I can also see how I’m dividing my time between hygiene and development work, and where the holdups are. When I started using the board I found that by the end of the week the only tasks I was completing were the hygiene ones rather than the more interesting development stuff. That really made me realise how I was prioritising work and made me shift in how I did things.

 

If this is something you’re interested in, you can modify your Kanban board to suit however you work, whether you want to divide up tasks differently or you want to have more stages in your processes. Plus, if you don’t have the wall space, or you just work digitally, there are so many online versions of Kanban to get you started!

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I’m back and I’m, hopefully, going to be better than ever!

Based on your feedback last year (thank you to all of the wonderful people who filled in my survey) and some thinking I’ve been doing things are going to be changing a little bit around here.

I’m still going to be producing the content I want to make and I’m still going to be posting at the same times. But I’m going to be prioritizing quality over quantity which might mean that some weeks I’m only going to post twice.

I’m also going to be doing a few more regular features including a monthly “how to” design based post, monthly roundups of some of my favourite people/reads/links and a few more researched long-form pieces a bit like my design stories series last year. I also want to share a few more reviews, but we’ll see how that goes.

I’m also going to be way better at replying to comments – I got super overwhelmed at the end of 2017 and pretty much stopped, which doesn’t help foster the kind of community I want.

Personally, I’m implementing a few changes as well. I know that new year’s resolutions aren’t for everyone. A new year doesn’t have to mean a new you. But I’m the kind of person who likes to have a marker to review against, and a new year is as good an arbitrary marker as any other. So, I’ve set myself a few habit based challenges.

Just like last year, inspired by a friend from uni (the inimitable Tucker Cholvin), this year I decided to put together another poster of my new year’s resolutions to hang above my desk to remind me to stay on track because I really think it helped me stay on task. 

I’ve gone for 5 habits again this year, because it felt like a doable stretch last year and I succeeded (with a minor blip) on 4 out of the 5, which isn’t too bad. This year I’m going to:

  1. Read 25 books. This is 5 more than last year’s goal. I know for a lot of people, this might not seem like a lot, but my time to sit down and read full books for fun rather than articles is always very tight
  2. Take a photo/video of some kind every day. This is building on how much I enjoyed doing my one line a day journal last year (and am continuing).
  3. Learn 10 new skills. I really want to push myself to go to more classes and to try my hand and making a few new things – I’m kicking this one off with a screen printing workshop next month which I am super excited for!
  4. Do 120 hours of exercise. Last year I ran the equivalent distance from London to Edinburgh, this year I want to keep up that momentum but also start to try a few new things rather than just running, so I’ve gone from distance to time.
  5. Implement a better sleep schedule. Last year the resolution I failed (really hard) at was getting up without hitting snooze. One of the big issues was that I didn’t address the fact that I hit snooze because I’m tired, so this year it’s all about having a better, more regular sleep schedule.

Did you set any new resolutions or goals for the year? How are they going? If you’re struggling it’s not too late to put up something visual as a reminder (I really like the fill in as you go aspect of these posters) – they actually work!