November Drop
A roundup of all my news from the past 5 months or so. I'm nothing if not inconsistent!
Hello!
Firstly, I’d like to apologise for the radio silence. I have had a VERY busy summer. Let me tell you about it! Grab a cuppa.
We bought a flat! Yes, you’re talking to a real life homeowner now. No, I won’t bore you by telling you about the 7 month slog from offer to keys, or the copious amounts of beans on toast we had to consume to save for the deposit. We got the keys on Joe’s birthday (I’m looking forward to him trying to beat that for MY birthday). We moved into it in August and we are still semi living out of boxes. We’ve had a Sims office/studio upgrade - now we have a dedicated tiny room for our work, instead of the kitchen table and the living room sofa respectively. Now I can be as messy as I want without tidying away for dinner. Previous sentence was redacted for relationship saving purposes.
The move from renting to owning was scary, then the realisation hit us that we can do whatever we wanted because it’s ours, so we bought a spirit level, hung a mirror, painted the living room ceiling the most beautiful bold yellow you’ve ever seen, and popped up a picture rail (as if it was the easiest thing in the world). We are doing as much DIY as we possibly can, making a lot of mistakes, working things out, and caulking everything we didn’t do right initially. I’m having such a good time! Safe to say it has taken over my entire life.
Alongside this I’ve been working on and perfecting my debut picture book with the amazing Magic Cat Publishing! A literal dream come true after SO many years of persevering. It really needs it’s own post so I won’t say much now and will talk about it later. I can’t wait to show you all!! I will be sharing the info here first so if you aren’t a subscriber - subscribe for that news! It’s coming out in June 2026. It has been such a journey and I feel changed for the better. It wasn’t always smooth sailing because creativity just isn’t, right? It’s hard work! But I feel more confident and stronger for it all. Thank goodness for the wonderful team behind me at MC!
I have also been working on a couple of story ideas, developed some prints out of one of those, and started a lunchtime drawing series that made it into Brighton’s Atelier-by-the-Sea Summer Open Exhibition, alongside lovely Children’s Book Illustration MA fellow graduate, Eline Veening. I shall write a post about this project soon as well to catch you up.
The past months I’ve not turned my attention to much illustration other than the book (which is very yellow and blue heavy - can you guess why? Teehee). So when my agent, the lovely Lorna Hemingway over at Darley Anderson Children’s Literary Agency who BY THE WAY is currently taking submissions, asked for a Halloween pic and gave a heads up about a Christmas pic, I was so excited to crack out a different colour pallete! I normally work in classic almost primary CMY (a cold blue, cold red, and a cold yellow) inspired by CMYK printing, layering these to hit all the colours of the rainbow. For this, I premixed glorious purples and greens and oranges, revelling in the spooky glory that is the secondary colour palette! You can see some of the layering on the raw edge of the vignette. It has made me so excited to work with other starting colours, just try and stop me!
This led to developing some Christmassy cards that you will be able to buy soon! Keep an eye out for a post on that too. I’ll save my plugging for the post, but all I’m saying is they’re very cute, your card receivers are guaranteed to love them, you’ll be supporting a real life person (me!) to make more wonderful work that you can oogle over, and they will be well made but kept super affordable for you as we are living in a dreadful financial time!
If you want to be kept up to date with all these lovely things you should subscribe, it’s free, I can’t foresee a future in which it will be behind a paywall, so you really have nothing to lose.
Thanks for reading, have a wonderfully cosy November. Go get yourself a hot choccy. You deserve it!
x
Some things I’ve been enjoying…
This recipe for Vegan Cherry Bakewells by the Domestic Gothess
The Color Insider, a substack all about the history of colours
The Farrow and Ball website for interior ideas, but doing our own thing anyway, and our local Johnstones for cheaper colour matching heheh
My new yellow living room ceiling (I love it so much)
Look how much tiny mirror me loves it!
THAT YELLOW CEILING IS PERFECTO!!!! Well done you busy little bumble xxxxx
Can’t wait to read your book with my bubba :)