I don't always have time to do every single day in a challenge, so I might just share some work that I've already finished.

If you're interested in doing illustration challenges, here are some great ones that happen at different times during the year.

Ongoing Challenges:

• KidsLitArt
• They draw and travel - Travel inspired, of course!
• They draw and cook - Food inspired artwork.
• They draw and garden - Artwork and prompts for flower and garden lovers.
• Room Portrait Club - Weekly photo prompts where you are invited to draw/paint/embroider/print your portrait of the room.
• World Watercolour Month - publishes promptsfor every month!

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Annual Challenges by month:

• DoodleWashed - January. Quick sketches and washes.
  
• MerMay - Mermaid inspired prompts for each day in May.
• World Watercolour Month - A big thing every July.
• Inktober - This challenge has been going for a long time. 31 prompts over the whole month of October.
• FolkTale Week - around November. Always amazing artwork inspired by stories from around the world.
• Jehane's 12 days of Christmas - during December. Great themes for different takes on Christmas art.

3. Continuity
When working on one-off illustrations, continuity isn't a thing. But a book is one, cohesive work, so the artwork has to be cohesive. One of the important factors in achieving this continuity is the colour scheme. The other obvious one is the style of illustration.

The third element is a bit trickier - keeping the characters consistent. This means that the little girl (pictured above) looks like the same little girl on all the pages. Whether she is facing side on or front on, happy, sad, laughing; she needs to look like the same person. She also needs to look the same age. This means getting the facial features just right can be pretty time consuming.

​You may notice that characters sometimes have the same clothing throughout a book. This helps us quickly identify them as we read. It helps with continuity. In Mummy's Midwife, I wanted Harper to have lots of different outfits because little girls often love playing dress-ups. This meant I introduced other elements to help her look the same. She always has pigtails and a clip.

4. Revisions/Art direction
Circling back to 'Time', there will be a number of revisions that need to be made at several stages throughout the project. From composition, to character tweaks, to colour changes. Communication is key as well as being a good project manager. It is important that you seek feedback at each stage and incorporate it before moving forward. It also needs to be made clear that once that project stage is complete, it is done. When working with traditional media, changing all the colours after painting isn't really an option, unless the budget is altered to allow for a full repaint.

Write each idea on a small square of paper and fold them up. Keep your ideas in a nice jar. You can easily add new ideas to the jar as you think of them. You can even colour code them, as above, so you can quickly pick a subject and a colour, for example. 

If you love lists and option 1 and 2 just seem like hard work, use a random number generator (or a child!) to help you choose.

Create your list of materials you want to try and objects you want to paint.
Ideally number each row.
Then simply plug in your total number of rows into the number generator and away you go.

Online classes are wonderful and SO inspiring. Plus there are a lot of free ones too! But sometimes, when you are short on time, you need to spend that time doing, not watching someone else. After all, it's the practise that helps you learn. Don't fall down a YouTube rabbit hole to find that it's time to start dinner and you still have a blank page.​

I'm happy to be presenting this full day workshop once again!

This professional development workshop is for artists, photographers and creatives wanting to make more money from their art. Do you love making art, while the business side of your practice gets ignored? Not sure how to secure an exhibition? Overwhelmed by the word ‘marketing’? Then this one day workshop is for you.
"Do I need a website and how do I sell my art online? How do I get noticed? How do I talk about what I do?" These questions will be answered in this full day workshop as presenter Hannah Katarski walks you through important aspects of running your art practice as a successful business, so you leave inspired and with an action plan for what to do next.

You will learn:
• How to talk confidently about what you do as an artist.
• Identify and find your audience.
• Ways to generate more opportunities for your artistic business.
• Social media and eCommerce - what you need and what you don't.

The seminar is taking place on Saturday, 18 June and s kindly subsidised by the City of Stirling.

Due to Covid impacts, I've now partnered with a number of printers so that my artwork can be shipped from 5 locations worldwide. This means you get your artwork quickly with a smaller carbon footprint. Print locations include Australia, US, UK, Canada and Europe.

I've been working on improving my perspective sketching and this image certainly challenged me.
​The image for the following week didn't inspire me as much, but I loved seeing the work of the other artists.

I LOVE this week's image, because of the colours. I didn't manage to squeeze it in before the deadline, but you can see my version below.

Be sure to check out #roomportraitclub on instagram.

If you are interested in joining in but don't know where to start, check out my online class where we paint a living room portrait with gouache and watercolour for our project.

I hand paint all my patterns with watercolour, building up layers and lush details. I then scan the finished artwork to create repeating patterns and a range of giclee art prints.

This design is also available to license on fabric, apparel and in other markets. Email me if you are interested. 

​The prints are left to dry. To make the next print, I ink up and wipe off my plate again. 

Plates made in this way can only go through the press limited times and so each of my designs will be limited to /15 or /25 prints in an edition.

When you see a number on the bottom of an artwork like: 2/25, that means it was the second print pulled in an edition of 25. U/S stands for Unique State and means that the print is unique, either due to ink colour, layout or the watercolours used.

I am really enjoying exploring this idea. I've been inspired by lace and antique chintz, theatrical costumes and colours of Venetian glass. ​

This artwork is printed at museum grade quality and available in US and European sizes, from 8x10" and A4, all the way up to 70x100cm!

I love taking online classes. Victoria Johnson's are some of the better ones I've done. She provides succinct, useful information and then great briefs from which you can launch into new work. The classes aren't about learning techniques, but building concepts and ways of thinking.

Her Create Collections class got me thinking about leveraging all the ideas I have to create a small series. This is far more efficient than creating five unrelated illustrations. I do love working this way, because sometimes I feel this need to include all my ideas in one design! I don't want to leave anything out. A series allows you to explore as many as your ideas as you want to.

For this collection, I combined florals and something new to me - birds. It was great to take on a new challenge an fun to create some simple coordinates to fill out the mini-collection.

These designs are all available for licensing.

This was such a dream project. I also learned some lessons along the way.

Communication is key and art directors and designers need to see what is in your head as much as possible. This is always difficult with painting, when the only way you can really show what the artwork will look like is by painting it!

For this project I created colour roughs with coloured pencil. I have also created them digitally, but for subsequent projects I'll be creating thumbnail colour roughs using paint. Thumbnails are small sketches with minimal detail and therefore faster to complete, while still communicating colour and feel.
Colour pencil didn't communicate the saturation or texture of watercolour. I have tried digital roughs but then need to mix my paints anyway.

The added bonus of using paint is that when I get approval, my colour mixes are ready to go.

This image was licensed exclusively in 2020, while that issue was new. It is now available for licensing.

I'm unbelievably excited to share my latest collaboration with you! "Beach Essentials" from Surf Shack Puzzle Co.

This was a match made in Heaven! Owner, Mahina is a fellow surfer who started Surf Shack Puzzles last year. I approached her about working together and she was full of wonderful ideas. This first puzzle was an adaptation of an illustration in my portfolio. I painted some additional icons to add more detail to the puzzle.

Mahina was wonderful to work with and I love that she promotes female artists across the world. Surf Shack Puzzles are made from recycled materials, come in plastic free packaging and are printed with non-toxic inks.

I created the elements with watercolours before scanning them and tweaking the arrangement in Photoshop. I kept to a colour scheme in order to make everything coordinate. (I talk all about this in my online class.)

I just love that there are so many avenues for illustration to find its way onto products. My second design will be launching with Surf Shack Puzzles a little later in the year. Sign up for my newsletter to be the first to hear about it.

Materials
​300gsm watercolour paper or Bristol paper
Watercolour, gouache or acrylic paints, coloured pencils or markers
Paint brushes
Scissors
Pencil and eraser
Tracing paper (or cheap oven paper)
Waterproof fine-liner pen, like Unipin (optional)
Light box or a bright window

6. Using the window again, trace your doll onto watercolour paper. If your outfits are on tracing paper, transfer those too.

7. Paint the outfits using your preferred supplies. You can even use coloured pencils or markers, or a combination. You may like to ink the important details with the waterproof pen and erase your pencil marks before painting. When painting, wait for one area to dry before painting next to it. This will stop colours bleeding into each other.

8. When everything is dry, cut out your doll and outfits with a pair of small, sharp scissors. Don’t forget to keep the tabs attached!

These paper dolls make wonderful gifts or keepsakes from an adventure. When you complete the project, share your paper doll with @mermaidscoin and #surfgirlpaperdolls on instagram.