Playing with horses

Now that Christmas and January are out of the way for a while, I’m back into a normal work pattern. I’ve been trying to set aside at least one day for playing around with ideas just for the sake of it. Needle felting is very much my ‘day job’ and my only other form of income, apart from my Patreon page, therefore any time spent being randomly creative is a luxury. So last weekend I set my needles aside and riffled through my everyday sketch book, to find a sketch I could work up and colourise. 

This sketch and the larger pastel piece are based on some little textile figures I created a hundred years ago. They form part of an internal world I’ve built up over time and I think of them as ‘the Walkers’ who travel silently and ominously through my imaginary lands (though sometimes I fancy I sense them creeping behind the field hedge at dusk). 

The next morning, I began setting up a scene for a painting I have in mind. I found a small fish motif in another sketch book and cut it out to make a pond.

Then, in need of a night sky, I roughly coloured up half of the backdrop…

…and made each Walker a fish amulet, using some lovely buttons. Worship the Fish! 

All of this is based around another roughly sketched idea, hastily scribbled down before it could escape. 

I took a final shot and edited it to produce the kind of lighting effect I will be aiming for, when I come to do the actual artwork. But playtime is over for a while, so the Walkers sleep until another day.

Up, up and up!

Well, hello! What a strange few weeks it's been. My final deadline has been vanquished and handed in. I promptly collapsed with a cold and complete exhaustion and am only just feeling like myself again. For a few weeks I pottered about the cottage like a rather substantial ghost; feeling empty and devoid of any creativity. I've never been that burned out and grey-feeling before, and I hope I never am again.

I'm very, very excited about what's going to be happening next year, when *things* go live, but glad I don't have the horrid clashing timelines anymore. I've just washed up eleven months worth of paint pallettes and restored the cottage with a housework blitz. Now that my time is almost my own for a while, I hope to get out and use these; I've been meaning to try my hand at landscapes for ages and it would be nice to do some art just for the sheer pleasure of it.

As a little reward for getting my jobs finished, I treated us to these gorgeous slipware mugs by Matt Grimmit, a Cotswold potter working from Evesham. I bought mine from Cheltenham Museum, but he also has an Etsy shop. (I wanted to have the humbuggy striped one, but Andy fell in love with it, so I've got the Mediaeval green one instead).



Andy was a bit nervous about using them every day; we've killed quite a lot of china on the cottage's stone floor. But the nice thing about buying modern ceramics from a living artist is that even if the worst happens, you can still replace them. That's the theory anyway.

If only life were as easy. I had a rather nasty encounter with a relation today, a sharp reminder of why I don't *do* family (in my case they are either ineffectual or downright bad news). It's one reason why I keep myself hidden away in this quiet life, as it brought back latent feelings of anxiety and stress which I've worked for years to dispel. It quite shook me up, but it also galvanized me into getting on with things and resurfacing - just in case anyone had missed me.