As London, very slowly, reopens I wanted to give a virtual tour of one of my favourite areas to share a glimpse with those who can’t visit and a few fun facts to make a visit more fun for those who can.
King’s Cross station has been a comforting presence in the city for me since I moved. It’s the station you arrive at if you’ve come from my hometown York so it’s the place I was most familiar with when the city felt unending in scale and scaries. It’s the spot that my mental map of London folds out from.
After five years in the city, I’ve spent plenty more time in and out of the station, visiting home and heading out for work. The more time I’ve spent there, the more I’ve explored and so this virtual tour (thankfully) goes beyond the station walls. It’s been a joy to run/jog to when I’m looking to push myself and I’m sure it will become a regular haunt again when commuting and travel become a little more common. I’m grateful it’s one of the few places I’d head to feel grounded, despite being a place of transition. While I’m not promising to share anything too far off the beaten track, I did love mapping and trying to bring some life to one of my favourite places.
As I did my research for my map I came across so many other fun facts that it would have been rude not to share, so here’s a bonus infographic you can use as a bit of a scavenger hunt if you’re ever in the station or need to impress a friendly tourist.
My phrase for the year is “with form and with thanks”. I want to focus on process and how I hold myself and I want to focus on gratitude and reciprocity. I wrote more about why in my end of 2020 reflections. So today I want to look forward to some practical steps on how I can make that happen and document it too.
It wouldn’t be one of my blog posts if that didn’t also mean illustrations, graphics and tools you can use going forward too.
Map the things you’re grateful for
Just like mapping the lessons I’d learned over the last decade at the start of last year, I’ve started with an exercise that I wanted to share with you but ended up being so valuable for me in the form of mapping the things for which I’m grateful. I tried to start at the most basic things I’m thankful for and then work my way up to the existential. There was too much to put into one little map of my heart, but know that it’s overflowing now. As you make your own map or list try to trace each thread of thanks to its sources; I’m thankful to be breathing means I’m thankful for my lungs, for them being nurtured and strengthened as I grew, for the air that passes through them being breathable because of the work of plants. The more threads you pull on the more you become aware of how woven together we all are with each other, the world around us and our pasts.
I’ve made this gratitude log that you can print, or just use as a template, as a way to keep track of the things that you become grateful for as the hours, days and weeks go on through the year. I don’t know how frequent a practice this will be for me, right now I’m aiming to do something weekly in this style but we’ll see as practice the process. Each card has space to include a description, photo, memento or sketch of the thing you’re thankful for, a space to trace its thread back to the source, and most importantly a space to capture the action you’re going to take in reciprocity. One of the passages that has stayed with me from Braiding Sweetgrass, which was the book that got me thinking about reciprocity and the environment, is where Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about taking her students into nature and their discussions of how they might pay their thanks for the land and plants that had looked after them for their trip. Their list was so varied and imaginative. Showing reciprocity for the things you’re grateful for, the gifts you’ve received, can take so many forms from a display of appreciation, acts of service, material support or even just paying it forward.
Share your thanks whenever you can
I don’t think I could leave this post without sharing a little thank you card design. There are things that trigger our thanks, like when someone goes out of their way to help us, but I hope this card can be used to say thank you to all of the people who deserve thanks for a longer term, more under the radar, work. It’s easy to forget the fabric of service and support we’re a part of, hopefully the gratitude map helped you remember like it helped me. But that fabric deserves to be thanked and shown the same reciprocity and generosity of appreciation as any more eye catching acts. I sent mine to a friend I’ve leaned on but never thanked for their patience.
This month I made a book full of collages. The first sketchbook I’ve finished in who knows how long.
After inktober, I was feeling nostalgic from school art lessons. I missed making to learn and having someone else set me challenges. Every term’s project at school started with an inspiration gathering exercise that always included a good week of collaging. We would spend hours searching through magazines and draws of art cast offs to find hidden gems that sparked some joy. Then we’d assemble them into a beginning to an adventure.
I feel like I’m back on the start of a journey with my art, so I went back to those pages of pasting to ground me.
I also wanted something that would feel like pressure free making in a different way to inktober. That exercise had been all about the mechanics of drawing, now I wanted something that was all about feeding the magpie in me and having fun. My favourite part of any piece is the deciding what to make.
Cutting up all of our discarded Big Issues and any other scrap paper, washi tape and flat paraphernalia I could find really was a throw back. I think I spent as long finding good bits of pattern and texture as I did trying to pull them together as something coherent on a page.
I ended up making what felt like alternative worlds and spaces. I think I was inspired by Emma Carlisle’s sketchbook club and all the tiny zines Austin Kleon made at the start of lockdown. They were abstract combinations to escape into rather than the literal mood boards I created when I was sixteen. That said they still got me thinking. The act of finding corners of beauty and interest and then collaging them into something new made me reflect on the compositions I choose, the contrast in what I make, texture and perhaps most surprisingly and importantly what I want to say with what I make. These pieces said nothing directly and got me trying to fill in all of the blanks.
Making a collage book is incredibly intuitive, but these are the steps I took if you want to take an afternoon to make and make meaning for yourself.
Make your own collage book
1. Gather up your materials.
These can be anything flat enough to stick down. Any old magazines or newspapers you have can be a great start, but if you don’t have any or many of those you can turn to packaging, tape, fabric, leaves, postcards, photos. Like I said, make a pile of anything flat enough to stick down.
2. Cut anything that you like, be a magpie.
You can either go with a theme or question in mind as you leaf through, like we did at school, or just go with an open mind and eye. As you look through try to pull out parts of images rather than full pictures. I often find it can help to hold whatever you’re looking at upside down to try to find something new in it. I cut out my pieces using a scalpel and a cutting board, but you can’t go wrong with scissors and ripped edges can offer some lovely softer texture. Try to have a mix of shapes and sizes by the end. If you’re collecting over a longer period of time, I highly recommend keeping bits in an envelope – you don’t want to lose your treasures!
3. Piece together, play on a page.
When you’ve got an envelope full of good stuff, it’s time to put it together. I’d recommend tipping everything out so you can see it all at once. Pick up something you like then try combining it with other pieces in a range of combinations until you find something that sparks some joy. I used a little muji notebook I already had in my draw as a canvas, but if you don’t have a spare notebook you can make a tiny one using these instructions.
4. Stick down and add any flourishes.
After moving your elements around, hopefully you find something you like and you want to capture. So, the only thing to do is to stick it down using an appropriate glue (pritt stick works for most things) and add any hand drawn flourishes. So many of my collages felt like worlds so I added a few trees and houses as well as some pops of colour that I couldn’t find in my paper stash.
5. Fill your book and come back to it when you’re feeling stuck.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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
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).
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.
