Why oh why are you bored out of your head for weeks and then a gazillion things come along that make your brain frazzle?
I've been very slack on the updating this week, but with good reason.
I arranged to go and see Mark up in London on Wednesday afternoon, which turned out to be a very interesting meeting. He's trying to get me to stop being so "safe" in my style and experiment more. I really want to give this a go, especially as even before Christmas I was getting bored with what I was producing and felt the style had somehow slipped into something else -something not as delicate and fun. It's just that I've had so much interest lately (but not paying work, alas) that I feel if I change things I could be shooting myself in the foot. Perhaps there's a reason no real work has come of it. This is the motivation I need to try things and not to be too worried if they don't work out - they're only experiments. I don't have to choose to carry on with any of them.
Mark did like my new postcard, though, which had arrived from Vistaprint that very morning. I am very impressed with the quality, especially for the price. I just need to send those out now, although my website badly needs updating first, but I could just get away with the minimum for the time being. He also though my Eeries story could make an interesting 96 page illustrated junior fiction title....hmmmm. Something else for the list. I'm so aware that time be always a-ticking and I never seem to be getting anywhere fast. I have done a fair whack of the character design project, though.
After seeing Mark, Lovely Jon and I met up had a bit of a wander about town, had a lovely waffle and hot choc in a tiny little cafe in Covent Garden, and then mosied on over to the giant Waterstones on Piccadilly. Never, ever let me loose in that shop. It was hard work to restrain myself, especially as they had a half-price offer on selected children's books. In the offer was "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle and Judith Kerr's "The Tiger Who Came To Tea". I never properly realised these books were both published in the late 1960's. I hope there are huge piles of my books in Waterstones in forty years time. We then went to FBC for a luvverly burger and delish onion rings, and then I tootled off to meet me Larrhhhdan illustrator pals from the AOI discussion board at The Crown Tavern. It was very nice to finally meet some people and re-meet others.
As nice as Wednesday was, Thursday I seemed to spend in a pit of dispair. It must've been the constant sleet and the lack of sleep over the past three weeks finally catching up with me. I had missed the delivery of my OSX update yesterday evening (Evening? EVENING? what kind of time is 6.20pm to deliver anything other than a pizza? ) and little did I know that the whole re-delivery palaver would not be resolved until this afternoon, and now I think I've killed the iMac trying to update it, so I'm just letting it sit quietly in the corner and hope it lives tomorrow.
Friday was Sister No.3's 14th birthday, so I went home for the evening and ate far too much. I now have a literal tonne of party-bag cake and assorted goodies to get through.
Even though I spent the majority of Thursday in bed (glad I had the last three days of the week off from the library), I did manage to drag myself out in the sleet to get a new sketchbook. Thank God for Pink Pig. They have done the job and inspired me to get on with things, I just need to do something, anything, to get me started off and then I'm hoping all these great new ideas will just burst out of me like in Aliens. But with less blood, hopefully.
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