A successful day, a little more achieved.

In the last few weeks our house has been riddled with sick bugs.  Working on this project has been a real challenge as evenings are my prime drawing time and unless it’s absolutely, absolutely necessary I don’t like to short-change the children on cuddles when they need them if they are poorly.  The sick cuddles of course led to me also catching an impressive sickness bug and I spent a huge portion of Friday night on the bathroom floor and unable to work for another evening.  Thankfully I was back up and bouncing by Saturday and the house is relatively bug-free for a change.  I’m stocking the children up with lots of fresh fruit, vegetables and pro-biotic yoghurts in an attempt to keep them in optimum health for February so that I can make my deadline of the 27^th.

So, today was successful because I managed to draw out another final black and white image for the book.  My client approved the thumb sketches during the week so I have two finals to work on currently and another thumb in process to approve.  

Now I just have to hit this deadline so must put my nose back to the grindstone!  My husband is helping by cooking dinner and the children are all asleep.  Baby O will probably wake around ten o’clock for a feed so I have an hour, then a couple more after settling him if I can stay awake.  My poor husband will be glad when this project is over so that I can give him some attention again.  He works from home so I am his social life and it suffers somewhat when I’m busy in the evenings.

Firstly thank you so much to Karyn for setting up such a fantastic site.  It’s exciting to be part of a project involving people going through the same joys, stresses, fun and troubles that I’m going through. 

I graduated in Illustration a long, long time ago and only made tentative attempts to work in the field before discovering that hitting the town and working in offices was far too much fun to avoid before settling down with a pencil in my hand.  I’m glad now that I did that but I felt quite sad over the passing years that my desire to draw seemed to have died completely.  I was surprised and excited last year when the artistic bug bit me so sharply that there was no turning back.  I discovered that I was pregnant with my fifth child.  I think that the thought of more laundry to fold and more meals to prepare made me determined to achieve something for myself.  Housework was taking over my life and I needed a good excuse to ignore it for a while.  

The excitement of drawing again made  me ridiculously over-eager and when our youngest was only two-months old I won my first commission to illustrate a chapter book (by putting in a very low bid for the job admittedly!).  It was pure hell but I was determined and pushed myself to the limits, starting work at 10pm (after preparing clothes and packed lunches for the children for the next day) and finishing at 2am most nights.  I was wisely told that this was a very dangerous precedent to set as it would be easy to slip into this sort of pattern of working.  I am now working on my second project, a colour picture book and having learned from my first project I have invested in a childminder for our baby to allow me 2 hours three afternoons a week while our twins are at preschool.  It’s amazing what I’m achieving in 6 unmolested hours.  For the rest of the week I have to fit in the scribblings between meals, housework, laundry and demands from a now 9-month-old teething baby!

I’m still very new to this world and I’m making my share of mistakes along the way so it’s a good time to be starting a blog here because I’ll be sharing my journey from the raw beginnings!  I look forward to reading posts from fellow creative Mums.

Lou