Happy National Illustration Day!
The 2023 slow-down #1
Today in the UK we’re celebrating all the art we see around us! Isn’t that wonderful? I’m really grateful for an excuse to stop and take time to be grateful for all the creativity in the world. After an extremely busy year of back-to-back projects, working over holidays and weekends, missing time with my kids, I’m finally at a point where I can slow down and unwind for the holidays, ready to start energised and refreshed in the new year.
As part of this, I want to think about all the people in the illustration community that help me, support me and make this lonely life sitting in the box-room working all day a little less… lonely. To start with, I would like to do a shout out to my incredible, amazing friends in Friday Doodle Club. Brenda, Sandra and Macha. We met via an online course in 2020, not knowing that the world was about to lock down, and suddenly it wouldn’t matter that we lived hundreds, even thousands of miles apart, we were just as connected as the people who lived down the street from us. Attempting to carve a new career for ourselves during this time really cemented our friendship, along with a shared passion for creativity, and moaning about, among other things, forehead size, adult acne and sleep deprivation. On 1st January 2021 we started Friday Doodle Club, and have chatted pretty much every day since then. Not just about the weekly prompt, but about absolutely every single part of our lives and I’m so grateful to be able to consider these girls as some of my best friends, despite having never met 2 of them!
If you’re looking for some beautiful art to fill up your instagram feed then I highly recommend following these girls:
And if you are an artist looking to fill your portfolio with expressive, dynamic, diverse characters, then feel free to give Friday Doodle Club a go! Here is the new prompt, launched today!
And secondly, I’d love to give a big shout out to Illoguild. Again, another powerhouse collective full of incredibly talented and ambitious creatives that consistently inspire and support each other to keep going, even when the the rollercoaster of illustration feels like too much!
Everyone is working on such wonderful, diverse projects and doing really amazing things, so I really encourage you to follow them all and see what they’re up to:
And a lot of the members of Illoguild also write a Substack. Every month we collate our answers to a chosen question and publish them via the Illoguild substack, so feel free to follow along with that and seek out the individual members. It’s so fascinating hearing all the different answers to the same question.
Thanks so much for reading this, it’s so nice to be able to shout about the people that keep you going. Feel free to give a shout out to anyone in your network that inspires you to keep going. I’m hoping to do a few more reflective posts during the news few weeks, and look forward to seeing your newsletters too.
Friend! So thankful to have met you and honored to get to "work" with you. It's so fun sharing my illustration journey with you and getting to see all your success! I look forward to much more shenanigans and finally meeting you one day!
I am so grateful to have you and the illoguild in my life! Couldn’t have done half of what I do without it!
Thanks for the shoutout! I feel honoured to be part of such a wonderful group.