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

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.

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

Ruth’s Pickled Thoughts: burnout & art block

OTHER EXCITING BITS

THINGS I HAVE BEEN ENJOYING RECENTLY