Doodling ravens & writing poems

Hello again, friends!

It’s been a little while since my last post, I had intended it to go out in March, but as usual, life got a little bit busy, and I’m left sat here, wondering how we’re already basically halfway through April! I’m certain that once spring begins to properly bloom, the year begins to fly by quite dramatically, but I’m not going to complain too much as it was a long winter and I’m extremely grateful for the warmer temperatures and brighter, sunnier days.

So, in today’s blog post, I’m going to be rambling about…

At the start of this year, I started working on a small personal project that’s a poem about a raven and some singing mice, and I wanted to write about how it came into being and the process behind creating one of the images for it. If you’re not sure what I’m on about, then you can find some of the other images on my Instagram along with the poem!

The project has actually started evolving into something new and exciting, so I have to be a bit limited in what I write in terms of the plot and what it’s about, but I’m hoping this will be a good insight into what went into making a project like this and why I did it.

One of my biggest goals for this year has basically been so start focussing on my own projects more, and to start writing - something I used to enjoy doing a lot, but haven’t done since I was a teenager, so it’s not something I’m hugely confident in now. I therefore wanted to create something short and silly, that encouraged the use of narrative-driven imagery, and that was completely achievable… because I’m very good at starting personal projects and then never finishing them.

The whole idea for the story came from a dream that Tom had, where he dreamt we were walking through a forest and we heard a strange sound so decided to follow it, and found the source had come from a trail of singing hamsters - exceptionally silly! I thought it might be fun to rewrite it so it’s a raven (because I like drawing ravens) who hears the sound and finds a trio of singing mice, it was short and simple, and felt like the perfect way to start writing and illustrating a narrative.

My original aim with this project was to turn it into a very small, wordless zine as I didn’t feel confident enough writing with words at this point, so I wanted to focus on telling the story through just the images, and I felt like giving myself the goal of a zine would encourage me to view it as a book rather than just a series of pictures.

So I began in my sketchbook, creating a page plan/storyboard:

(I’m so sorry I can’t share the full storyboard, it’s simply because my plans have changed with this project, as I mentioned above!)

As I worked on this, I began to struggle visualising it as a physical book. I think this was because with books, the page count has to be a multiple of four (because of how books are printed/made), so if you need to add any more to the story, like one page, it could end up being four pages instead just to make the page count work. I’m not very good with numbers, so I was getting really confused because it was only a short story, and I couldn’t work out the flow and page count. I’m also a very tactile person, so it was really hard to visualise how it would work without it being an actual physical book in my hands, so I decided to make a very rough, very tiny zine!

If you’re ever writing, or even working on a book for someone else, and find yourself in a similar position then I cannot recommend doing this enough! It was so incredibly helpful in terms of working out the pacing, how the images would flow together, and even what a potential cover could look like.

It was at this time that the poem came to me, and I know poetry is a difficult thing to do, and mine isn’t the greatest piece of poetry, but I’m really proud of it because it came very naturally in that moment and I think it tells the story well for something so simple (basically, it’s not the best but it does the job!). However, even though there’s now some accompanying text, it’s still very much second to the images, so I didn’t try to rework the imagery to incorporate the verses. Instead I was just going to get it printed as a separate bookmark to go alongside the zine, but unfortunately plans have changed a bit so there currently won’t be a zine or bookmark… for now.

At this point in a project, especially if I’m working for a client, I would take the very rough thumbnails from the book mock-up/storyboard and sketch them out bigger and neater on my iPad before transferring to paper and painting. But I decided not to do this for this project, as it was for fun, and I felt like the rough images corresponded well with what I had in mind, so I went straight to paper.

The supplies I used to paint the pages were:

• Caran d’Ache dry pan gouache

• Daler Rowney oil pastels *

• Inscribe earth tone soft pastels *

• Holbein acryla gouache in olive and mustard (mostly mustard)

• Daler Rowney graduate acrylic paint in white

• Winsor & Newton black indian ink with a fine nibbed dip pen

• Fabercastell polychromos coloured pencils in earth tones and black

* Apologies, I think the exact sets I used are potentially being discontinued as I struggled to find them anywhere but Amazon, and the soft pastels don’t seem to come in this small set anymore.

And I chose to paint on Daler Rowney smooth heavyweight paper as it’s really smooth and I like the warm off white tone the paper has, so working with any material on it doesn’t feel too stark. Please note that it’s not the thickest paper (220gsm) so I don’t recommend it for heavy watercolour/gouache work and it does buckle - I used this paper throughout my degree in similar materials, so I knew it would work really well for me! I also used a Q-tip/cotton earbud to smudge small areas of the soft pastels.

As I mentioned above, I started by sketching freehand directly onto the paper, and I just used a soft graphite pencil for this to help get different intensities in line and keep it loose, I also wanted some of the line work to show through! It’s probably good to mention here that I usually sketch in a red pencil as it’s easy to paint over (graphite can smudge when paint is added), and I did actually do this for some of the other pages.

I then did a wash of soft pastel (a light ochre colour) over the whole sketch, smudged it with my finger, and then went into the background with a burnt umber pastel, smudging it with a cotton bud. I wanted to build a muted palette in layers as I wanted the colours to have depth, even though the range of colours were limited, so there’s going to be a lot of that in these images.

I started blocking in the raven with two layers of soft pastel - I used a lighter umber with a darker umber on top, smudging it with a cotton bud. I also used the darker umber pastel on the background again, between the trees, over the layer I had already added, then over this I started adding the gouache. Using the pan gouache, I roughly mixed the dark prussian blue (it has a more turqoise hue to it than ultramarine) with burnt umber to make an almost-black colour, and applied this to the dark areas of the background.

I also mixed the olive and mustard acryla gouache together with white, and started applying it in rough brushstrokes to the ground.

As you can see from the top corner of the first image, I had the little dummy book open on that spread so I could make sure I get the values right and try to replicate its looseness as best I could in the painting!

Next, I blocked in the trees and log:

The middle tree and log were painted in slightly different mixes of yellow ochre, bright red, and warm yellow using the pan gouache. For the middle tree in particular, I think I also might have mixed in some of the mustard acryla gouache to make it more yellow and a thicker consistency.

For the bendy midground root, I used the same mix but with more red and a bit of burnt umber to make it warmer and a bit darker.

The background trees were painted in the same mix of colours but with a lot more tubed white gouache (either normal gouache or acryla) in them to make them paler/less saturated. Over some of them, I used the burnt umber/prussian blue mix, using more water to make it more of a gentle wash so they looked like they were more in the background, but still lighter than the background (I really hope this is making sense!).

I also went over the raven with a black oil pastel and coloured pencil.

I then had a lot of fun here! I started splattering watery paint over the top of everything for some interesting texture, I just took a large flat headded brush, dipped it in water, dipped it in the paint and made it nice and watery, then spattered it with my finger over the paper!

I just used the same mixes as before, alternating between the darker umber/blue mixes, and the warmer ochre/red/yellow mixes to add some dimension to the splatters.

I also felt like the ground was a little too vibrant and olive at this stage, so I painted over it using white (either normal or acryla gouache) to mute the saturation a bit. I also did this to, again, add more dimension to the painting, so it wasn’t just one tone!

After this, it was time to get the pencils out and start adding some depth to the background! I used a dark brown on the wibbly wobbly root and the central tree. To the background trees, I very gently used my favourite polychromos colour, dark indigo, to add some shadow to them.

I also used my pan gouache to paint in the background roots with burnt umber, which I also used to create some shadow under the raven, and used the umber/blue mix on the raven himself - using it over the oil pastel gave it a really nice uneven coat to him, so even though he’s small and black, there’s still a lovely level of colour depth to him.

At this stage, I felt like the image needed some bolder colours, so I switched fully to acryla gouache as it’s more opaque and behaves a little more like acrylic paint. I painted the log with mostly yellow ochre and a touch of mustard and white, making sure to leave some of the layer below showing to give it some texture and depth of colour.

I also covered the floor with pure mustard, using small brushstrokes, again leaving the under-layer exposed, partly for texture, but also to build the environment a little, implying the ground is uneven. I added similar strokes of yellow ochre over the top for the same reason.

I went back to pan gouache for the rock in the corner, mixing pre-mixed grey and prussian blue to get the different tones (more blue makes it darker).

And because I had then painted over a fair bit of the lovely spattering I had done earlier… I added some more!

It was then finally time to block in the sound wave, I used plain white acrylic, not mixed with anything else. I did a couple of layers of it, enough to block out most of the splatters, but still kept some of the brushstrokes showing. I knew I wanted this to be the flattest part of the painting, but I didn’t want to go too far as I didn’t know how flat I wanted to go, and I knew I could just edit it digitally if I wanted it to be flatter.

I also held off painting it in until this point because I wanted it to have a clean edge, and if I had done it earlier, when I hadn’t finished the background, I would have just kept painting over it and wasted my time! So I waited until the background was basically done.

I then went back to the coloured pencils, I used the dark brown on the log, and outlined certain details, like the log, bendy root and rocks with the black. I also painted in the raven’s eyes with white acrylic and drew the purple in with black coloured pencil.

Finally, I added in the final details:

I used dark brown with a gentle layer of black to do the foreground leaves and grass, as well as the grassy details in the ground. The dark foreground plants were painted using a base of black coloured pencil and then a layer of black Indian ink, drawn in with an extra fine nibbed nip pen, which I also used on the raven, drawing in his legs. I also added in some subtle lines to the raven’s body so that his wings were more defined!

And that’s everything! The process for the other pages were basically the same, the only difference is that on some of them I used a red pencil to sketch the image rather than graphite. All the colours were the same and how they were layered up as well.

I hope this has been an interesting read and, most importantly, that it’s made sense! Please feel free to let me know what you thought in the comments. :)

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read my silly ramblings, I hope you’ve enjoyed it and take care!

Ruth x

OTHER EXCITING BITS

My NEW online shop is coming soon! It’s all ready to go and I was going to launch it today, but then I remembered we go on vacation in a week and it seemed a bit silly to do that, so instead it’ll be launching in early May, and here’s a little teaser of some of the new products!

The new shop looks SO good and I can’t wait to share it with you! I’ll be sending another Newsletter out in around three weeks once it’s open, eeee!

Last weekend we went to Edinburgh for the Endless Love Creative market, where I got to sell my work at the beautiful Fruitmarket Gallery, it was such a lovely venue and such a great experience! The organisers are always wonderful and we had the best table neighbours.

We made a full trip of it and got to spend the day exploring Edinburgh! It was our first visit there and we loved it, the city is so beautiful and the architecture and cosy streets are just WOW. It’s also got such a lovely atmosphere given it’s a big tourist destination and capital city. The only thing we didn’t account for was the surprisingly high temperature drop from 20 degrees in York to only 7 degrees in Edinburgh! We had to buy some emergency jumpers!

I took a few photos, though, and am hoping to have a gentle moment some time soon to sketch from them.

I’m taking a break from selling at markets/conventions for a while now, my next one won’t be until Thought Bubble in November! Instead, I’m going to continue focusing on personal projects, my portfolio and growing my online shop. I absolutely love selling in person and it’s always a wonderful experience, but it’s also very exhausting with all the build up beforehand, the travel, and then a busy day of interacting with people. So I need a little break!

In degu news, they’re all doing well, especially Moyashi and Chewy. Aramis (the little one in the photo) unfortunately had an injury last month that she’s still recovering from, we think she either had an infected bite or hurt her leg, so she’s been on antibiotics and is still on pain relief medicine, poor bean. She’s in good spirits, though!

I’m currently teaching them tricks, like climbing onto my shoulder from the ground, it’s going well! They also climb onto my hand on command and do tiny high fives.

If you’re interested in more frequent degupdates, then feel free to follow their Instagram! I’m more active on there than I am my actual account, haha.

And that’s everything for now, thank you so much for reading and I hope you’re all doing well, I’ll leave you with some of my tiny joys from the last month. :)

TINY JOYS

Music

I’ve revisited Belle & Sebastian’s first album, Tigermilk, it’s been the one thing I can listen to while I write, and is also probably quite fitting as we were in Scotland last weekend!

Books

I’ve become deeply invested, once again, in the Old Kingdom books by Garth Nix and have stormed my way through Lirael, and am now reading its sequel, Abhorsen. I’m then going to go onto Clariel before Goldenhand, which I haven’t actually read yet and I’m so excited! I’ll then go back and read Sabriel, which I skipped this time because I really wanted to draw some bits from Lirael… none of that sentence was at all confusing…

But yeah, if you’re into fantasy novels, then I cannot recommend these books enough. I’ve been hooked from the age of 14!

TV & Film

I can’t seem to get on with current TV shows, so I’ve just become invested in shows from the 00s. We’re currently working our way through Prison Break and I’m watching The Office US in the background while I work (for the millionth time). I’ve also been watching loads of Game Grumps, and have worked my way through their Phoenix Wright play throughs, Majora’s Mask and now Ocarina of Time.

Ruth’s Pickled Thoughts: burnout & art block

Hello friends,

Welcome to my first ever newsletter and blog post, I hope it finds you all well, and it’s great to have you here!

I wanted to start this blog/newsletter to hopefully create a small and cosy space to connect with you guys outside the conventional realms of social media, especially after the significant changes that have happened recently on Instagram. It’ll also be nice having somewhere to share more of what I want as opposed to appeasing an uncontrollable algorithm!

As the year is still relatively young and fresh, I thought it would be a good time to start this new venture, and I thought a good starting point would be to write about the transitional time I’ve been going through for the last couple of years, and the difficulties that have come with it.

So, 2023/2024 were hard years for me for many reasons, we had some huge life events, a fair bit of loss, and just a lot of work - it led to the most severe burnout and art block I have ever experienced.

Professionally, my focus was on client work throughout these years, but unfortunately I wasn’t working on the sort of projects I wanted to be or enjoyed very much, and I was feeling very boxed into a market I quickly discovered I didn’t want to be part of. But add to this the eternal financial pressures of being freelance, I felt like I had to take a lot of these projects on all at once, which led to an exceedingly full schedule and a heck of a lot of work. In 2023 alone I worked on over 10 client projects, which was not as great as it sounds!

So it’s not surprising this led to burnout, the severity of which was so bad that I had no motivation to draw at all - the concept of it made me feel somehow more exhausted, which has never happened before. I just couldn’t face looking at a pencil or sketchbook, and I just felt very hopeless and quite lost. 

The biggest obstacle I was facing was that I simply didn’t know how to render an image, I’d have a pencil in my hand, but I just didn’t know how to create… anything? It wasn’t just that I didn’t have a desire to draw, or that when I did my sketches were bad, it was also that I couldn’t visualise how to make my hands create. I think it partly stemmed from the need to quickly churn out work for clients, which meant I had to be working in a particular way that was speedy to produce and was also fitting to that market, so I felt like I didn’t know how to create anything that wasn’t that. And it was quite frustrating because I had stories in my head that I desperately wanted to tell, but I had this big wall in the way that kept stopping me from putting them to paper.

After many failed attempts at drawing for myself, I decided to just accept the situation I was in (for the most part, anyway), and realised I just needed to be patient with myself and trust ‘It’ would come back to me at some point. So instead of forcing out new work from scratch, I started taking older doodles I’d already done and just coloured them in:

This turned out great as it was completely mindless and silly, with no pressures at all, and it didn’t take much time around client work. It actually ended up generating product ideas and providing content for me to share online, which took a huge pressure off as there’s always that fear that your followers will dry up and leave you if you don’t constantly share something new. I also feel like the existential crises half these animals look like they’re going through are definitely me channelling some of myself into them!

Around this, I was burying most of my free time into movies and books, they provided a great form of escape. Reading let me use my imagination in a way I couldn’t with a pencil and movies allowed me to get lost in someone else’s creative vision. Eventually, after one LONG marathon of the extended editions of ‘The Lord of the Rings’, I found myself grabbing a sketchbook and pencil… and I doodled!

This was the first time I had drawn something from scratch for myself in such a long time, and it was a relief to find I hadn’t actually lost the ability to draw (I’m particularly proud of that Saruman).

I then got heavily invested in the 'Daevabad’ trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty, I actually read all three books twice within a few months because fell so deeply in love with them. The world, characters and plot were just so fantastically created, and on the second read, when I was so desperately willing myself to literally jump into the pages of these books and enter the world, I found myself yet again with a sketchbook and pencil in hand.

It was shocking! After months of feeling blocked and stuck, I’d actually drawn something from my imagination, and it was for a book no less! I want to say it felt amazing and like all my burnout and difficulties were lifted… but they weren’t. Yes, I’d managed to create something from scratch, but I didn’t really know how to take it to the next level, where it goes from a little-to-no-thought doodle in my sketchbook to a proper, fully realised illustration. I still didn’t know how to render an image from conception to colour.

So I decided to go back to my old sketchbooks and see if there were any recurring themes or techniques that I really loved using, and I made a list of what I found:

• Natural pencil textures

• Negative space 

• Gouache/watercolour texture

• Coloured pencil (my favourite medium since a teenager)

• Black & white imagery - either entirely pencil or with ink

2015 sketchbook.

2015 sketchbook.

2016 sketchbook.

Colour thumbnail, 2016.

Painting, 2017.

I think ‘pencil textures’ and ‘negative space’ are the most prominent, and I definitely have a distinctive way I like to draw! I did discover, though, that there is a huge disconnect between my sketchbooks and the work I share online - none of the work on social media or my portfolio was/is reflective of how I enjoy working, and in some ways it’s not surprising I’ve ended up in a market I’m not happy in.

A particular moment from school kept coming back to me as I looked through my old work, when my art teacher caught me using a pre-mixed tube of green paint on a painting, and she said to me, “Ruth! You are painting, not colouring in, MIX your greens!” While I don’t think there’s anything wrong at all with using pre-mixed paints, lots of people do it and it works great, I know she wanted my colours to have depth to them, and this moment felt similar to my work at that time. It felt like everything I’ve been making for social media, my portfolio and client work feels like it has just been “coloured in”, and has no depth or anything unique about it - it’s all just marketable and that’s about it. I fill a gap in a market.

I obviously wanted to change this, and in order to do that I needed to start working differently, painting and building textures with physical mediums, and getting all personal with my work… which is all easier said than done when you’re facing a huge, stomach churning art block. How can you render something as you want to when you just simply can’t? The image is there, but your hand just repels the pencil like the same poles of a magnet.

I found that the solution lay with the same art teacher who scolded me - I just needed to go back to absolute basics (thank you, Mrs McEwan). In school, I was classically trained to paint, and we did master studies to help us improve both our work and skills, so that’s what I started doing, I went back to my roots and started doing master studies of classic paintings.

Right, a study of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’ by Johannes Vermeer.

Right, study of a painting I saw in the Louvre, unfortunately I didn’t get the name of the painting or the artist.

The joy I felt while working on this was immense - the studies required enough thought to be interesting, but also such little thought that it was thoroughly relaxing, and this has become my favourite sketchbook because I feel so happy when I look through it. They made me pay attention to things like brushstrokes, lighting, colour, and just made me think a little bit more about what I was putting on the paper.

And on the topic of thoughtful brushstrokes, my local art gallery at this time happened to have an impressionist exhibition on that featured the water lilies by Monet, so I grabbed my paints and sketchbook, and took myself on a solo art date to go see it.

Left: ‘Water Lilies’ by Monet at York Art Gallery. Right: Painting by Thomas Buford Meteyard at York Art Gallery.

This ended up being quite a special trip for me as I lost my grandma earlier last year, and one of my fondest memories is when she and my grandpa got back from Paris and they’d got me an art kit from the Monet museum and a sort of (but not quite) ‘paint-by-numbers’ painting of the water lilies piece, I was only about 5 and I was thrilled to pieces to colour it in. So I’m happy I got to see it in person and attempt to recreate those INSANE brushstrokes in gouache, pencil and marker.

I think happiness plays a key role in how we’re feeling in our artistic journey, and usually my best work is created when there’s no pressure and I can just be happy, creating. If I’m not in the best mindset and I try to force something, then usually it just ends in frustration, and I really feel like this has shown in the last couple of years for me, but this study of the water lilies is my favourite of all the studies I did because I was so happy while I painted it.

After the success of the impressionist exhibition, I found an event hosted by a local food/bar in my town where they were holding a Bob Ross draw-along, which is exactly what it sounds like - they provided the big screen, an episode of ‘The Joy of Painting’, some canvas paper, and I brought along my homemade travel gouache to paint with.

Bob Ross in ‘The Joy of Painting’.

My outcome of painting with Bob Ross.

This was a lot of fun, but it did turn out to be a bit of a weird exercise as it had the opposite affect of the Monet painting, I ended up feeling really disconnected from it! I guess even though most master studies are a direct copy of the original painting, you don’t actually see the original artist at work, and you’re not literally copying everything they do, so there’s always some artistic license with them. But this was all copying exactly as he did (or as close as you can with travel gouache), so in some way it didn’t really feel like mine. It was really fun, though, and I recommend painting along with Bob Ross if you get the chance - I really feel like my fir trees have significantly improved!

All in all, though, these little exercises helped so much, and I cannot recommend them enough if you’re feeling a bit stuck! It’s just so freeing to study someone’s work, even if you don’t paint like an impressionist or baroque painter, because I learnt so much about how the original artists might have worked, and even with the older paintings I feel like there are skills there I can apply to my own paintings. (As a disclaimer, though, I feel I need to say that the only time copying is wrong is if you post online claiming them as your own, not crediting the original artist or trying to monetise them - none of that is cool.)

I did eventually feel that it was time to turn to more modern artists and studying those that align more with the original list I’d made at the start of this journey. So I did… and then got severely stuck on Jon Klassen’s work and that’s as far as I got. I just love his strong use of shape and negative space, his pencil and mixed media textures, his use of limited colour and also black and white. He just ticked a lot of boxes!

The left is the original drawing by Jon Klassen from the book ‘Pax’ (written by Sara Pennypacker) and right is my version.

This was my favourite study, it just made me think so much about how he uses the negative space, the intensities of the values and the shapes of the trees and fox to make a textured, balanced, bold, but still (seemingly) simple image. And I realised that I want to put that much thought into my work.

It made me think of a story someone told me about Quentin Blake and how he draws the same image over and over again until it’s right (if you’ve ever done a study of his work, you’ll see this is accurate), and while I don’t want to redraw the same thing that many times, I want to be putting that much love and attention into my work. I want all the textures and shapes to be thought about, and I want them to be rendered in the mediums I love using, so that’s what I’ve started doing!

My focus this month has been on experimenting and creating as much as I can, both with style but also technique and shape. My favourite mediums have been dry pan Caran D’ache gouache (not tubes), coloured pencil, oil pastel, black ink and chalk pastels (I particularly like smudging them with an earbud) - my hands and desk are a complete mess when I’m working now, with colours smudged on every surface and paint splattered everywhere, which I take as a very good sign.

I’ve been trying to break out the box that I’ve put myself in for client work, and I feel like I’m getting there! The stories I want to tell are slowly coming together and I feel like I might actually be able to bring them to life, which is huge progress considering where I was this time last year.

The next stage of all this is working out how to bridge the gap between the colourful, cute animals I share to social media and sell in my shop with the new experimental work I’m creating. In an attempt at achieving this, I’m working on a “warm up” story (you can see some snippets above), just to see how storytelling works for me in real paint, and while I don’t think it’s there yet, I think it’s on a good course! I’m excited to get it finished and to share more with you, it’s very dumb and silly, and the plan is to share it online and also sell as a short zine.

None of this means to say that I’m not better or running at full speed, because I’m not. I’m still working slowly and within my means, and some days I still find I need to just sit on the sofa and watch some TV, and that’s okay. I know that if I push too hard at this stage, I’m going to end up back to where I was very quickly, and I don’t want that to happen, but I am very much relishing in the progress I’ve made.

This probably won’t be my last post about handling burnout, it’s such a huge topic, but I hope sharing this journey is helpful for someone in some way, and I can’t wait to share more with you! Feel free to sign up to the Newsletter if you’d like direct emails straight to your inbox when a new post is out. I promise not to spam you or share your details with third parties - this is just a safe and creative space.

Thank you so much if you made it this far, your dedication to my pickled thoughts is very appreciated. Please feel free to leave a comment about what you’ve thought to this, and how you handle burnout & art block - the healing process is different for everyone and I love hearing what works for people!

Sending you lots of love,
Ruth x

OTHER EXCITING BITS

My Etsy shop is back open and I’ve reopened watercolour pet portraits!

I am still working on my online shop, it’s just a slow progress setting up an entirely new platform. But it’s official launch date is going to be 1st March and I’ll be doing a small shop update with new pins and stickers. I’ll also be doing a little promotion with a free gift with orders! More info. about it will be in the next newsletter (feel free to sign up if you’d like to be notified)! <3

I’m going to be at Endless Love Creative Sheffield on 8th February at the Showroom Workstation!

It’s my first market of the year and I’m so excited for it, I’ll be bringing all my prints, pins, stickers, coasters and copies of Catventures. If you’re about then it would be lovely to meet you!

And in the spirit of Instagram discontent, I have joined BlueSky and so far I’m really enjoying it. I never really got into Twitter, but it’s nice having somewhere I can post silly things just for the fun, something which Instagram lost a long time ago!

THINGS I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING RECENTLY

I have been playing Okami a lot recently, it’s my first playthrough and I am in LOVE.

The style is absolutely gorgeous and I just want to draw every time I play, which I think is a good sign things are improving!

Following on nicely from that, I’ve started learning Japanese, doing a little bit each evening. I’m really, really enjoying it!

We have three crazy degus (sort of like big gerbils) who have their own Instagram account (@degupals), and it turns out degus are pretty big in Japan, so I just want to engage with people on that account a bit more as the whole feed is in Japanese. It’s great because helps get my brain working in a different way and is a good excuse to watch anime with subs.

Lastly, I’ve started knitting a cardigan with some wool I got for Christmas!

I’m using a pattern by Florence Miller, it’s really cute and simple and I’m excited to work on it. I’ve knitted jumpers before but never a cardigan!

As you can see it hasn’t got very far, but hopefully I’ll finish it sometime soon… unfortunately I also feel the sewing bug creeping up on me, so we’ll see!


Thank you so much again for reading, it’s really great having you here and your support means so much!

Ruth x