I’ve been asked by my University, Oxford Brookes, to start a blog detailing my artistic journey. That includes what I create, the thought processes behind it and retrospectives on how it could be improved.

So I started a blog on Tumblr! It was a site I knew from a few years ago, and the tagging system made sense to me. It was about a month later I recieved an email that detailed that the blog specifically had to be on WordPress. In a similar way, they asked me to start a sketchbook, which I did – before (in the very same midsummer email) requiring it to be A4, which was considerably bigger than the size I’d chosen for myself.

So here we are, progress wiped and starting anew – new blog, new sketchbook, new me. In a note of optimism, I have been searching for a long time for a decent blogging platform and for some reason I dismissed WordPress, but after making the effort it looks like the perfect site!

And in regards to my sketchbook, I was a little distressed upon hearing that I couldn’t hand it in to fit the brief. And by distressed, I mean a month of serious work became irrelevant. After a very short and very mature cry, I tackled that problem by taking high quality photographs of all the relevant “survival kit” pages and scaling them up, before sticking them chronologically into my new A4 sketchbook.

The upside of that was that my small sketchbook had very quickly become a personal sketchbook – that is, doodles, irrelevant paintings and studies, etc. This is great (and what I am told constitutes a good sketchbook) – however, when I read the Survival Kit brief, it seemed like the sketchbook was supposed to be a lot more on-topic than I had made my own. So this is a chance to set that right, too!

I’ll see if this blog doesn’t take a similar turn. I guarantee it’ll become a diary. Because when I make art it’s inextricably linked to my life and what’s going on, so it only makes sense that I talk about the inspiration and cause of what I make. Want an example? I stitched lavender into the embroidery because I’ve spent all the summer season working at a tea shop on a lavender farm, and manning a gate to a beautiful lavender field. So there we go!

Let’s see if I can’t satisfy my need for order by figuring out how to categorise blog posts.