Holiday sketches

During the summer holidays this year I managed to fit in a few watercolour pencil sketches while camping with family in Wales. Aberafon Campsite is a beautiful location overlooking Caernarfon Bay. It was also a great chance to think about how I create my work as a whole and look at the approaches to my creative practice. Simplification and balance is the primary focus in what I am aimimg for. So a change of scenery such as the camping trip was always a great starting point and a sort of reset without any of the daily pressures getting in the way.

It was during the holiday that I decided to play with looser lines in my sketchbook more so than usual. I love going back to basics and I think it's always a great way to exercise our own mark making methods. This is very much what I have been encouraging in the art classes that I have run, where mark making is a key to growing confidence with our unique expression. I feel that once we start to recognise this within our creative journey, it could makes life easier when translating these new found marks through different media... Well that's my latest theory anyway!

Aside from this, as a whole I haven't been painting or drawing very much over these past few months. At one time this would of made me very frustrated through the lack of being prolific and worrying about losing what I had built up. But I am recognising that every now and again this is ok.

Recently I have been working more on this website and less on the social media. I felt that my focus had been led astray by keeping up with posting content rather than using it as a tool to display my work 'when the time felt right.' There have several moments where I've felt a pressure to post something as soon as possible and not really think properly about the context of the artwork just for the sake of throwing it on social media. It is on that basis I've come back to the word balance and try to use these tools in a different way and post a artwork when the time is right and not as for a creative race track.