Back Into the Swing of Things Post Burnout

In the lead up to my 7 week travelling adventure around Australia and Bali, I worked myself flat out. Achieving so much last year both within my work life and personal life, that I’m unbelievably proud of, but unfortunately it came at a cost.

I naively threw around the word burnout quite loosely, knowing I was wearing myself a bit thin, but with the outlook that it would all be worth it once I was away on my travels. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case, and despite the trip being incredibly inspiring and joyful, it was also unbelievably overwhelming. The experience of travelling for a long time, taking in new surroundings, and being out of my routine, on top of already being very burnt-out, caused my mental health to deteriorate. Towards the 2nd half of our travels I experienced a fair few meltdowns, and along with this came a worsening of my mood and outlook.

Returning back to the UK was thankfully mostly quite grounding, as I had people and places around me that enabled me to calm down and get back to feeling more myself. I definitely found aspects of returning home overwhelming too, and unfortunately took on more work than I was able to handle, which definitely did not help. I did however after a month of being back, and feeling pretty horrendous, finally accept I wasn’t able to keep going at the pace I wanted. I cancelled a project midway through (something I’ve never done before) to give myself some breathing space, and started looking for a therapist. I was becoming quite hopeful that this would be the start of feeling better, but unfortunately shortly after this I got laryngitis and became possibly the most ill I’ve ever been… I’ve heard a lot of people say the phrase “make sure you rest, or your body will force you to” and I feel this was a perfect example of this. As a result of being ill, I had to cancel markets I was booked on and paid for, had no hope in completing any projects, making stock or even replying to emails. It took around 2 weeks for my physical health to get back to a functional state, but my mental health had only deteriorated even more. My to-do list felt like a completely unachievable mountain of tasks, but I needed to do something as my flow of income has understandably taken a very hard hit.

It’s now been over 2 months since coming home and I FINALLY feel back to my normal self. I’ve worked my way through the vast majority of my mountain to-do list whilst also prioritising self care. My income is still certainly not thriving which doesn’t help my stress levels, but working myself to the bone again isn’t an option right now.

I’ve restocked with all of my retailers, worked a couple of markets, completed a few commissions, reached out to shops, and made some baby steps on personal projects. Thankfully, sales wise the markets went really well, as I was really dreading an exhausting and disappointing day, but they gave me the confidence boost I desperately needed and encouraged me to book in for more as well as restocking some products.

Each of these tasks were no easy feat, but now on the other side of it, I’m reminded of the incredibly feeling of satisfaction that comes with my work, and I’m finally at a place again where I’m proud of my current self and not negatively self comparing with others, or even my past self.

Throughout my episode of burnout I particularly struggled with self comparison when it came to my Instagram presence. I am however, coming to accept that this desire to constantly create content, is exhausting and also really not that beneficial. Yeah pushing your work in different ways to engage an online audience is defiantly helpful, but I think many platforms encourage this constant train of media to be produced, and many of us fall into the trap that we need this to be successful. We don’t, and I’m always trying to remind myself of this.

My website has always been my favourite way to showcase my work, so I’ve been putting in there hours here and there to make sure my website is up to date, and the best it can be! I’ve also spent some time recently making my instagram page more similar to my website, by preparing posts to pin to the top of my profile that answers some FAQs regarding shops, market dates and commissions. This hopefully, will enable me to waste less time on the app all together, and consequently spend more time focusing on illustration!

First Editorial in Print of the Year, and A Push for Bigger Publishing Opportunities

This week I received my copy of Breath Magazine which was a pleasant reminder of one of the many reason why I love editorial projects. It’s been a while since I completed an editorial commission that was going into physical print, so I forgot how lovely it when you get delivered a copy a few weeks after completion; it’s also a great excuse to immerse yourself in the illustrations and writing of other artists, away from a screen, something particularity prevalent within the essence of Breath Magazine as they are very focussed on mindfulness and wellbeing.

For this commission, I responded to the words of Angelique Hechavarria, celebrating the Italian tradition of eating together. I created 3 seperate illustrations to fit with 3 different peices of text. The first and largest being a long wooden table ladle with fragrant foods, feeding a group of family members and friends. The foods shared on a table include, tortellini pasta parcels with a red tomato sauce, a Medierrean salad with houmous and avocado, beef tomato and mozzarella salad with basil, and garlic bread and red wine. The second illustration features two women enjoying alfresco dining, and the third and smallest of the 3 illustrations includes a salt and pepper grinder and a glass bottle of olive oil, to accompany a sweet potato quiche recipe below.

Although this project was unfortunately not very well paid for the amount of time and effort I put into it, it was carried out during a difficult period of burnout, and now that I am thankfully feeling a lot better, I’m glad I pushed through and now get to enjoy the end result. It’s also acts as validation for myself. I struggle to create illustrations without context. I love being given a brief, being inspired in that way enables me to create things that remind me how capable I am of doing so, as I would not have drawn the image otherwise. Additionally, as much as I adore work in print, I don’t enjoy printing, so it’s even better when that part of the process is done for you. This along with a few other factors has defiantly given me a little kick of motivation to push for more collaborative printed work, as it’s a reminder of how satisfying it is at the end. I’m feeling encouraged to vear my focus a little into bigger projects such as books. I’m finding my practice quite isolating and also fairly same-y at the moment, and I’d really love to work on something for a bit longer, with a small team. I think I’m craving more substance, collaborative creativity and enthusiasm, and that deeper sense of satisfaction that comes from bigger projects.

As always there’s still some bits going on in the background (I can’t ever focus on just one thing), including personal projects and the admin of showcasing my work online, small scale commissions, pushing products to shops and new market audiences. But I’ve certainly ignited a spark to try reach out of more collaborative community projects and possibly push for publishing opportunities too. However both of these areas require some much needed research and I doubt will just fall into my lap in the same way smaller scale/ one-off commissions do…


Sketches to Replace Perfectionism

A couple days ago I accidentally deleted an illustration that I spent 3-4 hours working on, which caused quite the emotional breakdown and spiralling negative thoughts about myself and my illustration work 🤡 fun times! Thankfully I’m now working through my feelings a lot better, and learning the hard way that I need to regularly duplicate my files on Procreate lol…

This new years, I set myself a goal of creating more illustrations for myself, this developed into creating a collection of travel related drawings, illustrating some of the memories I was making. I was really excited about the project, and the first few illustrations I created were ones I was pretty happy with. But as time went on, and ideas were growing, I started getting more critical of my own work, and stressed that I was getting behind.

I wanted to quickly create multiple illustrations, with this expectation for them to all be to the same standard of my usual work, and all on a programme that I still haven’t quite mastered, as I obviously can’t bring my full set up with me. This, along with the very incredible, but also very overstimulating experiences I’m having whilst travelling, were all a bit too much for me to handle.

I also feel for the first time (at least to this degree) that social media is having a negative impact on me. Usually I find platforms like Instagram and Linked In a really helpful and inspiring tool, and I’m happy to see other people succeeding. However, with my mental health already being in a negative overwhelmed state, I was constantly seeing incredible projects coming into fruition, and this lead me to thinking I needed to take note, and be inspired, and do similar things, rather than focusing on my existing project, and being graceful with myself and a calmer and slower approach to continued learning and progression within my career.

So for now, I’m taking a break from social media, and a break on this personal project, giving myself space and time to breath and decompress. I have an exciting commission in the works too, with a client who is thankfully giving me far less stress than I give myself, so that’s I nice distraction! For now enjoy some messy sketches to breakup this need for perfectionism.

I’m back in the UK next week! So hopefully by the end of the month I’ll be re-opening my online shop, sharing some upcoming market dates, and some finished drawings too. Ideally all with a much clearer headspace 🫶🏻 

WACA

Disrupting the chronological order of my travel illustrations, (not that anyone other than myself would notice or care) because I started an observational drawing whilst at a cricket game in Parth, and wanted to finish it whilst it was fresh in my mind!

I don’t do observational illustration half as much as I’d like to, and I don’t have any particular interest in cricket, but my partner Tom does, and convinced me to go by saying it was only a very small, casual game, and would be a relaxing environment I could draw in, and it was! I’m glad he did as I think it’s super helpful to mix up your process when drawing. I mostly draw from photos, which works a treat, but I always find capturing a live observation gives you a more unique perspective, and loosens the need for perfectionism.

We attended the WACA to see West Australia vs New South Wales. I barely paid any attention the sport, as I was much more interested in people watching in the audience. There were probably less than 50 attendees, and I’m pretty sure we were the only guests under the age of 60. Most of them, like me, had a book or a newspaper with a crossword to give half their attention to 🗞️