What is science to me?

Rain, sketchbooks and a Panini - the perfect trip to the zoo.

Sketchbooks. Something so mundane and so ordinary for any illustrator but something that is also so important. I’ve been using sketchbooks for years. I remember when I was younger and I got a portfolio case for Christmas which was full of sketchbooks, pastels and charcoal. I was about 10 at the time and absolutely loved to draw (not much has changed). I used to have some “how to draw books” and would diligently copy the drawings in there and wonder how on earth the original artist managed to draw them without having something to copy. Those initial sketchbooks slowly filled up and more were bought. I don’t think I have ever thrown away a finished sketchbook, they’re all still stored around the house collecting dust. There’s just something so lovely about being able to look back at the journey my art has gone through and to remind myself of just how much has changed.

It's been a while hasn't it? I think it's been a good few months since I’ve written a blog post and this was pretty much my face when I realised just how long it's been! Life just got away from me and before I knew it I was packing up my art supplies and moving to start my new job. If you follow me on instagram you’ve probably seen me ramble on about personal projects and portfolios, which is what I’ve been doing for the past few months (and also why I've not been around much). I applied for my new job all the way back in March (doesn’t time go fast?) but the start date wasn't until September so that left me five months to work on my art without worrying about job applications and CVs. I knew I wasn’t going to get this sort of opportunity again for a while so thought “why not update my portfolio, website and do a project just for fun?” so that’s exactly what I did. I know as illustrators we’re told to always have an up to date portfolio on the go but I must admit, I’m the kind of illustrator who enjoys making art too much. I always put off the scanning, editing and putting together of my work because it takes so much time. In the time it takes me to get three sketchbook drawings up to portfolio standard I could’ve done a whole day of drawing and produced five more sketchbook pages! But portfolio updates have to be done sooner or later and my last one was ages ago so it desperately needed to happen. My work has changed and developed so much over the past year and half that I was actually excited to see what it would look like formatted nicely together. I always work in A4 sketchbooks, normally across a double page so I end up with an A3 drawing. I’ve only got an A4 scanner though so that always means a lot of frustration and hope that the scanner gets through (it’s also very old). Scanner woes aside, I also find it hard to work out just what to put in my portfolio. As a general rule of thumb I try to stick to around 20 pages because no one wants to sit through 50 pages of my work, no matter how good I think it is. So on a random day in May I got together all my most recent sketchbooks and a pile of sticky notes and set about trying to choose. I sticky noted almost every drawing. Which was a problem. But I told myself that you never know what they look like edited and some might come out better than others so I might as well scan them all. I should add that I like to work in Royal Talens sketchbooks and they have an off white, creamy coloured paper. When I edit drawings I always like to put them onto a white background so there’s some magic which has to go on to make sure that the colours stay true to how I want them, even when the base paper colour changes. I also became a pro on my scanner settings. Normally I don’t give them a second look and just click “scan” but this time I made sure to adjust the backlight, exposure, noise correction and other fancy toggles I had completely ignored before. Eventually I managed to get some settings which made the scanned image look pretty much the same as the drawing, but with the creamy paper taken away. Turns out I was right and some cleaned up better than others. Grey is a really tricky colour to get right. Some of my grey pens come out so similar to the cream background that trying to take away one often takes the other away with it. So that instantly got rid of some drawings for me, which was a bonus (although I have since gone back to those drawings, scanned them in again and they’re now in my portfolio).

Pens, pencils and a sharpener - the staple of all art supplies. That’s what you start out using when you first try and draw and it’s these simple media that often get overlooked when something fancier comes along. For me my media choices have varied hugely throughout my life.

As we start to emerge from our weird lockdown haze, I thought it was a good time to reflect on how my practice has developed over the past few months. So lets start at the beginning. Where were you when lockdown started? A question no doubt everyone will know the answer to. For me, I was in the middle of an amazing temporary job at Pan Macmillan Publishing, London. This was an opportunity which only came about as a result of the effects of COVID-19 on the book printing factories in China. I was a temporary Dummy Book Maker and was loving every minute of it. Me and my friends Jennie and Lydia had just started going to a wonderful little museum called “The Museum of the Order of St John” in our lunch breaks to draw on location. We had plans!

COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown impacted so many industries and events it’s impossible to keep count. Museums and galleries that would normally be bustling with people were now empty and large events were cancelled with little to no intention of rescheduling. As a result of this, the internet became the answer. Suddenly events were taking place remotely and people from all over the world were meeting virtually. A similar thing was happening in the scientific world. Now, I won’t pretend that I know about the geological conferences and events that take place each year nor will I pretend that I would’ve been able to go to them normally. All I know is that I have an interest in geoheritage and fossils and I was lucky enough to work on a project in my second year of University with Dr Jack Matthews at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH) illustrating Ediacaran organisms. As these geological conferences and events were being cancelled I noticed something on my twitter feed - The Oxford Geoheritage Virtual Conference (OxGVC) was happening and not only could anyone sign up - it was also free. Anything free and with the opportunity to draw along to had me interested. I signed up, got my confirmation email with links where all the online sessions would happen and waited for the conference to begin. Hosted by Dr Jack Matthews, Dr Lucie Kubalíková, Dr Helena Tukiainen, Dr Lubomir Strba and Dr Taha Yours Arrad, the virtual conference promised 60 talks (both flash talks and longer lectures) from all over the world and it definitely did not disappoint! From the very beginning people were presenting their work live from Brazil, Morocco and New Zealand and we were able to ask questions in real time in the on screen chat. As well as being an opportunity to learn about geoheritage projects, having over 60 speakers throughout the week was also a great way for me to practice portrait drawings - but what started out as practice soon developed into a little project. By mid week I had 30 portraits and thought “what am I going to do with these?”. Then I remembered being in year 1 or 2 at primary school and getting to do the infamous class tea towel. For anyone not familiar with this, it’s sort of a school tradition here in the UK. Each child gets to draw a self portrait which is then added to the class tea towel and parents can buy a copy to keep. My sister and I still have ours and they’re a great laugh to look back on which is why I was beginning to think that making one for the conference would be a great idea. It would be a nice way for all the speakers to remember the event and I was guessing that not many of them would’ve had their portrait drawn before. Hoping I wouldn’t offend anyone, I got to work drawing the remaining speakers each day and collating them each evening. Even now I think it’s a wonder that I managed to get all 60 speakers drawn. It’s common knowledge in our house that our WiFi isn’t the best and I was sat outside in the garden (far, far away from the WiFi router). The more people I drew the more anxious I was that the wifi was going to cut out. I was completely invested in making this tea towel and it would hardly work if I had to miss one or two people off because I’d missed their talk at the very end. Somehow though the signal stayed strong and I managed to see everyone’s face long enough to get a portrait done. This is probably thanks to my Dad as he kindly agreed to clear his work schedule and only took zoom calls in the mornings before the conference and in the evenings once it had finished for the day. As mentioned earlier our poor WiFi was never going to manage both and Dad, sometimes sacrifices have to be made!

Another year, another inktober. This was the first year I decided to do inktober “properly” and what a 31 days it was. I must admit, I did do inktober last year in amongst my third year university work and even though I finished, it wasn’t what I would consider to be my best work (if you scroll back far enough on my instagram you’ll find it) so we’ll pretend that didn’t happen and focus on this years work instead. I decided that I was going to do inktober just a couple of days before it started so had to quickly scrabble around and find a prompt list. I went with the “official” list as I knew a few people who were also using that list and I really wanted to see how everyone (myself included) would come up with different ideas from the same word. There are so many other prompt lists out there; so definitely have a look around before settling on which is right for you! Normally when you think of inktober, you think of black and white pen drawings but that wasn’t really something I wanted to do. I’ve spent a lot of time this year refining and developing my style and I really wanted to continue that development in these drawings. To do this, I decided that each day I’d create a new stamp and a new character based on the prompts and also try to come up with a little line of poetry which included the day's prompt word. To put it simply, I’d just given myself a lot more work to do and I was in for a very busy October! Looking back at all 31 drawings, I can definitely see how much I refined my drawings over the 31 days and how much better I became at making my characters believable. Instagram was so useful to me during this process. I didn’t think anything of it when I was posting on my page and story each day, but as the month progressed it was so interesting to look back and see how my ideas were getting better and how I was beginning to create narrative within my drawings (something I tried so hard to do at University with varying success). I guess it’s true that sometimes it’s just best to stop trying so hard and let it come naturally! When it came to coming up with ideas for each prompt and creating my stamps I didn’t really have much of a plan. I had no idea what I was going to do each day and it was so much fun to just sit down and come up with loads of silly rhymes to start the day. Of course, life outside of inktober goes on so I did sometimes have to do a couple of days in advance but apart from that, everything was unplanned! The prompts themselves this year were a mixture of words- some I had ideas for instantly whereas other were a lot harder and obscure. Ripe? bait? tread? those were some of the hardest prompts this year. Overgrown was also a hard word to make anything rhyme with! In terms of rhyming and writing I feel that I’ve also managed to improve upon that this past month.

So, third year finished, our degree show came and went…what to do next? D&AD New Blood Festival happens every year and is a showcase of university courses and their students’ work. This year is was between 10th-13th July at the Old Truman Brewery, Shoreditch, London (a great location surrounded by lots of trendy shops). Each year the Illustration course at Plymouth University take the third year students and their work to the festival and it’s a really fun way to end the degree.