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I survived Inktober, well Peachtober.

This month I created 31 pieces for the 31 days of the month. This was the first time I’ve ever tried a drawing challenge like this before. In the past, I’d either realised that it was inktober on the 12th of the month and decided it was too late or psyched myself out because I thought I couldn’t make work that was good enough. But after a long while of feeling quite stagnant in my work and seeing Sha’an’s approach to the challenge for the past few years, she’s tried out new materials and styles to improve her work, I decided to give it a go.

I followed the #peachtober20 prompts that Sha’an put together, they’re designed to be quite literal and easy to visualise which I appreciated. But I also wanted to use this as a chance to try something different. So I decided that for every prompt I would do a study of a piece of art history, using the vast array of works available online from galleries like The Met and The National Gallery. That meant I was just focused on drawing and drawing in new inspiration. Then to further differentiate this month from my usual work, I decided to focus on sketchier pieces with texture and more shading.

I followed those rules and made 31 pieces. I have to say I started a little before October so I could build up a little buffer of sorts to ensure I kept posting even if I had bad days, but I did pretty much draw something every day for the month (except for Sundays).

This is my month’s work.

Throughout the month I kept a little log of all of the challenges, my favourite pieces and things I wanted to continue after October and I wanted to share a few reflections more publicly. So here are 5 things I learned doing my first drawing challenge.

Just drawing was fun but that doesn’t mean it’s not hard

I really enjoyed just getting to work from other people’s pre-perfected compositions and focus on the skill of drawing. My illustration work is usually really focused on telling a story/making a point so I spend as much energy on the idea as the execution. But because this was all execution based I put way more time into details that I skip in my own work. 

Give into the prompts

Through the prompts Sha’an shared, I drew things I never would have thought to try on my own. It was so fun to just give over control and get inspired through a constraint. When it comes to personal work I usually have to come up with my own constraints and I haven’t had as clear a defined set of parameters for drawing since I was doing GCSE/IB art projects which had to respond to a theme.

I actually quite like texture

After years of very simple, flat line based drawings it was a bit of a surprise to see how much I liked working with texture and that I could even create something different. It was new but it still looked like my work, at least I think it did.

There needs to be more negative space in my work

Some of the pieces I liked the most were the ones with lots of darker areas and negative space. I want to take that away from this piece of work and bring it into work going forward.

You can do all the social things right and still not see results

Weirdly, I think the biggest lesson I learned wasn’t about my drawing but about Instagram. This month I think I did everything that you’re meant to do: I posted regularly, I had a consistent theme, I had interesting captions, I used an active hashtag, I engaged with other people using the hashtag, I made good stuff. But I lost followers. My engagement continued to be in the gutter. I’d already been trying to separate my work from its social reception but now I know I have to do that when it comes to Instagram.

Overall, inktober/peachtober was more exhausting than I had imagined and I thought it was going to be a tough slog. I was so burned out from drawing more detailed pieces that by the last week I couldn’t face doing more than finishing the last couple of posts when it came to illustration. Despite that I got so much out of doing it. I created work I never would have done without the prompts and made things I’m really proud of. 

Will I do it again? That’s a question for next October.

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While the saying is usually a month of Sundays, I’d like to talk about the last week of Sundays. 

I’ve spent a week of Sundays getting used to taking regular time for myself. I certainly haven’t invented taking Sundays off. Sundays are historically a day of rest and time for reflection and family. But personally they haven’t been until the last seven weeks.

Before this challenge I worked every day. I think I’ve worked every day, in some form or another, bar specifically scheduled vacation days, since school. I’ve always spent my weekends working whether that was homework or coursework throughout school and uni, or client work and blog content creation over the last four or so years. I keep busy. I keep out of trouble.

But I don’t always keep well. That was the issue. After getting so much out of long three day weekends to use up annual leave and a real re-assessment of  priorities during pandemic times, I decided I wanted to be someone who had a weekend that was for me.

I have to say I love it.

My Sundays are now about catching up on life admin bits that make my days easier and just doing things I enjoy. Whether that’s running a little bit further than I can in the week, luxuriating a little bit longer in the bath, watching a whole film or taking a moment to pause. I feel like I have time again. 

It’s not been without its struggles though. I say struggles in the mildest sense, as what could truly be hard about taking time off? 

Well, I still have the same amount of work to do as I did when I spread it out over seven days instead of six. That’s meant I’ve had to be more focused and work a little longer on a Saturday to make sure I can rest on a Sunday. I’ve started to set an out of office for Sundays and make sure I let clients know and preschedule things like my newsletter. It’s forced me to be more organised but also more cut throat with myself when it comes to deadlines. If something is set to get done on a weeknight it has to be done in that time box, not linger over. There are pieces I worked on for inktober that I just drew a line under, knowing I could have done more but that I valued my time to myself more. Plus, after so long valuing my days by their productivity I can’t say that I don’t get itchy hands as I find myself with a few spare hours of a Sunday evening.

Putting a hard regular boundary on your time is hard, especially if you’re not used to it. But I’m realising it’s the only way, for me at least, to make sure that you slow down and really enjoy the change in pace. Half hours here and there don’t add up the same and you can’t always magically undo a deficit with a week away, just like you can’t make up for a bad sleep schedule with a long lie in as much as I would love to.

It’s been an adjustment but it’s also been a long time coming. While I try not to write about it here or in my newsletter for want of sounding like a broken, slightly sad, millennial record I’ve been running on embers for longer than I should probably admit. 

I still want to make things. Or at least, I can’t imagine a version of my life where I don’t make things. But I think that this shift to prioritising my own time, like the decision to start drinking the tea I’d been saving in case someone special came to the house (because goddammit I am someone special) is a sign of a bigger shift to come. 

I’m questioning more and more why I’m drawing, why I’m writing, why I’m posting, and I don’t always have a good answer. And if I don’t have a good answer, shouldn’t I be spending my efforts doing something I know the why for like taking a good long afternoon nap?

Naps aside, I think that’s probably one for another day. 

So for now I’ll be enjoying my Sundays without the yolk of productivity and singing its praises to anyone who’ll listen and not think I’m a complete workaholic bore.

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“I have a personal policy against taking on spec work.”

That was my response this week when I was asked, after being approached to do some illustration, to produce work with no contract or promise of payment so the client could decide which artist they wanted to take on the job.

The personal policy line is one of the few things that stuck with me from 2016’s it self-help book The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F**k. The idea is that a personal policy is not only a clear boundary you can set, it’s also a way of expressing that boundary that isn’t specific (and so isn’t personal) to the situation. 

I’ve found myself having more and more of these difficult more confrontational conversations recently. Drawing those boundaries of what I will and won’t do for myself, as much as for anyone else has been so empowering. Having a list, a written down physical list, of what is and isn’t okay for me has started to relieve me of some of the guilt I feel when saying no to people. I know I’m late to jump on the boundaries bandwagon, but setting out my own work morals has been great. 

For me having personal policies has meant I have fewer and fewer conversations with myself before replying to someone where the dialogue loops round in an endless cycle of “I don’t want to me a bad person for not helping them … but I want to value my time … but I do this for myself, I have another job, I don’t need the money … but this is bad for the industry … but I don’t want to be a bad person because I’m not helping…” 

For the people I work with me having personal policies has meant I can be upfront and honest. It’s still been hard, but as someone who avoids conflict and hurt feelings at almost any cost, it’s been a low-risk way of me saying no and it’s one I’d wholeheartedly recommend in situations like this.

New pound coin design illustration

As well as advocating for personal policies, I also wanted to share why I’ve set this particular policy against spec work.

Spec work, short for speculative work, “is any kind of creative work, either partial or completed, submitted by designers to prospective clients before designers secure both their work and equitable fees” often in the form of competitions, pitches, or recruitment skills tests.

I don’t rely on illustration as my main, or even a significant, source of income. If I wanted to I could take on unpaid work. But I don’t. 

If I’m taking on work for a client, I work like a professional and expect to be compensated as such. That sets both of our frames of reference. Like offering a personal policy, it makes clear where we stand, particularly when you start with a contract that sets everything out in black and white. Getting paid also allows me to reinvest in training, tools and my own creative projects. That means I can work on those creative projects for free without pressure and at scale. I couldn’t have made Imagining Future Space without the income from my freelance work to pay for things like domains and fonts. I’ll work on my own projects for free because I’m free to make what I want, because they challenge me to grow and promote my passions.

But almost more importantly than that now for me is that it sets boundaries for illustration as a profession. Every time we take on spec work, unpaid work, or work for exposure we promote the “practice of designers ridiculously undercharging themselves in the hope of “outbidding” potential rivals, in the process devaluing their skills and those of the design profession.” Because I’m in a position to say no to opportunities that don’t align with the work I want to be making or the way I want illustrators to be treated I feel I have an obligation to do so.

I know there are illustrators and designers who don’t have that luxury, who because they rely on their creative output to live and so have to bid for every piece of work, will spend time on competitions, may undercharge out of fear that if they lose this job they may never get another gig again.

Where I can, I want to set a standard that supports them. That informs clients about what good looks like and means we’re all respected for what we do. 

So when I sent that message about my personal policy against spec work, I also sent an explanation about why I don’t take on speculative uncontracted work and other ways they might find out if the artist they’ve chosen will fit what they need.

I hope what I shared was helpful and respectful but clear. I said no, but I felt okay about it because I’d set my boundaries with myself and with them. It was professional but I don’t think it was cold. 

In short, I now have a personal policy with myself to use personal policies to protect the things I care about.

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For the last year and a little bit I’ve been a member of ENGINE UK’s shadow board. ENGINE is a full stack agency which covers creative, communications, media and transformation, essentially it’s like a creative marketing and comms powerhouse that works hand in hand with data and consultancy know how. The shadow board was an opportunity for 9 of us from across the business to come together and shape the future of where we work, support our executive team and ultimately see what it means to be a leader in a different context.

As my time on the shadow board is drawing to an end, I wanted to put together some personal reflections alongside the group work we’re doing to support next year’s cohort and share the good stuff we’ve learned. 

This was the first time ENGINE had ever had a shadow board. Well, in fact, a junior board which we swiftly renamed a shadow board. So we didn’t really know what to expect. 

We went through a long recruitment process, sharing written submissions, doing hot seat interviews and group tasks all to find a group that could represent the diversity of disciplines and voices in the business, and who would hopefully work well together too. Our purpose became championing the voices of our colleagues and sharing what it was like “on the ground”, offering fresh energy and expertise to central projects, and spending time learning about the business. Alongside still doing our day jobs!

It’s been a full on experience, with highs and frustrations. 

We launched a new intranet. We rejuvenated our onboarding processes. We put plans in motion to make ENGINE culture much more active and physically present, before COVID put a little spanner in the works. We researched and designed new career progression guides. We tried to make sense of what the pandemic will mean for us as people and a business. We learned from Jim our CEO. We learned from each other. We learned more about ourselves.

Professionally, I learned a great deal about what makes a big people-centred company like ours tick. I don’t think I had ever really stopped to think about the decisions our exec made day to day, there was a lot more tactical management of the stuff that’s the “boring” fabric of the business than high flung strategic work. But the more I saw, the more that made sense. You need that fabric to be woven tightly if you’re going to use it as a sail to take flight. There’s a constant tug and pull as you go, trying to balance priorities and budgets. But ultimately it comes back down to working with people.

I learned more about how the other parts of our business work than I thought I would. Having been on a graduate scheme where I spent a year rotating around different sections of the company, I thought I had a good handle on what we did. But the time I spent with my other board members, reviewing training plans or trying to come up with cultural events, made me realise how different our approaches to problems can be. There are a lot of similar foundations in what we do (research, insight, strategise, produce something that resonates) how a group of PR people can hive mind a brief when they’re together, how a group of strategists will research and analyse it, and how a group of designers will immerse themselves and workshop it can look and feel very different. They’re each incredibly valuable and I’ve been made much wiser by watching other brilliant people work.

But I really wanted to reflect here on a personal level. If there’s one thing that will stick with me long after this experience, it’s that things are what you make of them.

It’s the most obvious lesson and also the hardest (for me) to put into practice. As I mentioned, when we started our time on the shadow board we weren’t really sure what it was. We were the first people to ever form a shadow board in the context we had. We struggled really hard with defining the role for ourselves. We struggled with getting projects going. We failed to get some things we wanted done and (in part because of that) we failed to win some people over. More often than not it was because we wanted to discuss and not do. We’d been trained as great diplomats who could come up with ideas and plans, who can research the pants off anything you need us to, but without the burning fire of a client we weren’t always the best do-ers. I wasn’t always the best I could have been. If I could go back and start this all again I’d want to be braver and bolder. In order to lead you have to go out on a limb to take a first step, knowing it might be wrong but also how much worse it can be if you don’t.

My favourite projects to work on, our careers project, the intranet, our exec shadowing discussions, were my favourites because we had a clear scope and we had a real drive to get something done. We applied what we knew of our expertise and drew on other people as experts in their own experiences.

If I’m ever a leader that’s what I would hope to provide. I would want to model clear communication and confidence in action (and responsibility with failure). I would want to acknowledge the strengths and diversity of those around me and amplify those talents, knowing I still have so much to learn. I would want to remember that things are what you make of them. 

Now that I’m leaving the shadow board behind, I’m not sure what’s next other than focusing on trying my best at my day job. It’s changed my perspective and I think it’s made me better. But I don’t know that it’s made me want to have loftier ambitions.

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It’s been a while since I’ve made one of these posts, which is a real shame because I love sharing the things, people and ideas that are inspiring me. In fact, that’s a big part of why I started this blog. I’ve been sharing fortnightly(ish) features on the artists I’ve been loving on social media in my newsletter, so that those social streams can become a place for exploration and fun again. But I wanted to take some time here to share some of the people (all women in this case) who have been inspiring me throughout lockdown in lots of different ways. Hopefully you’ll find someone or something new here that will light a spark. Plus, I just love drawing portraits!

Without further ado, let’s get into the list. 

Emma Carlisle

I’ve been a huge fan of Emma Carlisle’s landscapes for the longest time – I’m currently working out how many other things I can move so that I can buy her Zennor print in the giant size it deserves to be. There’s something about the way she combines brighter colours and sweeping marks that evokes such a strong sense of place and feeling. 

Emma has inspired me to loosen up and try to embrace the feeling of what I make more.

Blair Braverman

I’m trying not to turn this blog into a Blair Braverman fan site, but it’s very hard.In her own words Blair is an author, dogsledder, and adventurer who uses innovative storytelling to make the outdoors accessible”. Her twitter is full of insights into the world of dogsledding from how you feed dogs for a 300 mile race across the ice to making your own hat to moose sightings to the sheer number of layers you have to wear. She doesn’t spare the details. She really does make her world accessible. But she never makes it look easy.Other than the gratuitous number of great dog pictures I think that’s why I keep turning to her tweets and her book as a companion at the minute. Blair has an incredible way of making herself at home and then finding the dog-filled joy in discomfort and reminders others to do the same.

Blair has inspired me to get outside and try to find the story in everything I do.

Maggie Rogers

Maggie Rogers was my most listened to artist last year, and the person I saw live the most too (back when gigs were a sweaty hard to see the stage thing). But what’s really stuck with me over lockdown is her short documentary, Back In My Body, and her interviews. She’s clear about supporting the causes she cares about, but also that she’s going to take her time to make things on her own terms. That’s something I constantly need reminding of, thankfully I can get my daily dose in alongside a dance party.

Maggie has inspired me to take my time with what I make, enjoying the process and movement, but then being intentional about what I share.

Megan Rhiannon

I’ve been retuning to pictures of Megan’s journals and illustrations for a long time, because I find them so soothing. There’s just something about the idea of putting everything in your mind out onto paper so you can see it and draw the connections outside of yourself that’s so calming. She recently worked on a huge, brilliant, personal project about autism and it’s been lovely to see existing autistic come together and take off. I can’t recommend her Instagram and YouTube enough if you want some space to breathe in thies weird time. Plus she’s got me back into drawing margins and using coloured tags in my notebooks – it’s life changing!

Megan has inspired me to follow passion projects and document more in the times when my memory feels like it’s failing

Natacha Oceane

I mentioned in my post about learning to run, that Natcha’s video about running an ultra-marathon with no training really turned a switch in my brain and got me going. There’s something about the way she tackles physical challenges with such positivity and determination that’s really inspired me. I have to be honest and say I’ve not done a single one of her workouts, but I have learned so much about nutrition and how exercise actually works through her accessible science videos.

Natacha has inspired me to run and start with the idea that I can meet a physical challenge before I start (even if I’m very slow about doing it).

Jinjin Sun

I’ve been loving following Jinjin Sun’s #100daysofarthistoryjinjins project, where she’s recreating famous portraits and self-portraits with added Jinjin. Each piece is brilliantly done and filled with character and little details that bring it to life. It’s been so nice to view these classics with fresh eye and see someone just make them their own with such confidence.

Jinjin has inspired me to revisit those old artist studies we did in school and try to apply my own perspective to what feels classic.