Hello! It's been about 2 months since I last shared anything on this blog and, without getting into excuses because I could be here all day making them, I thought I would just share some snapshots of what I got up to and what kept me busy from the start of December 2015 till the end of February 2016! So here we go...

Throughout the beginning of December I was focused mainly on getting uni work done for our crit we had before the end of term. I shared a lot of the work I was doing and some of the process throughout my Vlogmas videos on YouTube [haven't seen them? Watch them here]. A huge part of this process involved creating just random painty textures and marks to use in building up my design and art work.

So during this time I worked on quite a few different pieces of work that I was pretty happy with. The first of which has kind of spawned a whole new series of work (more on that later). The middle image was created more inline with creating some designs for the greeting cards company Thortful, although I still need to get round to reuploading the files as they never seemed to save originally. And then the last was another little Christmas Decoration I made for friends and family made from wood and inspired by a lot of my #Create365 illustrations from last year. 

Durinng my time off at Christmas from Uni, Darren and I planned a trip to go to Edinburgh to finally visit the Christmas Market that they have on every year. As we were only in Edinburgh for about a day and a half, most of the time we spent there was in the market or looking in the shops. Although we did have a visit to some Art Galleries as well. Again, since I was doing Vlogmas during this time, I did share some of what we got up to on that so check that out if you're interested in seeing more. 

At New Year, Darren and I stayed at my hometown this year so that we could head down to one of Scotland best New Year attractions. In Stonehaven there is a long time tradition of an event called "The Fireballs". It pretty much involves local residents walking up and down the old High Street swinging metal crates stuffed with rubbish and set on fire (thus creating the 'fire balls'). At the end, the swingers will walk down to the Harbour and throw them into the sea. From doing this, the idea is that it will burn off the bad spirits from the year before so that the spirits of the New Year come in clean and fresh. [The more you know 💫]

In January I didn't do much apart from being back at uni after the Christmas break. During this month though, the N.E. of Scotland had a pretty crappy storm which meant after coming into Aberdeen to catch up with a friend, I was stuck in town with no way getting home as buses and trains got cancelled (although I did manage to get up to Darren's and stay there). 

It was also Darren's birthday this month so I made him another themed birthday cake for him, which was Xbox. The main cake was decorated to look like a Xbox One with an accompanying controller. The cupcakes on the side were decorated with either a symbol or physical item from the 5 games Darren enjoyed the most in 2015, so they included: Destiny, Star Wars Battlefront, Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege, Fall Out 4 and Halo. It was fair to say he was happy with it! 

Lastly, in January I finally got round to colouring my hair- and by colouring, I mean COLOURING! I had bought some directions hair dye back in November'15 but since I needed two days to lighten my hair then dye it the colours I never got the chance to get round to it till now. Although all the colours I had didn't really come out as different strands of my hair were meant to have light blue, dark blue, turquoise and purple. In the end it pretty much came out as varying colours of green/turquoise and a dark purple/brown. But I still love how it looked. 

In February I had a slightly busier month with practically something on every single week(end). Within the first week of the month, Darren and I headed down to Glasgow to see the band Mayday Parade, as well as obviously going and stocking up on my supplies from CassART. Later that week I had two birthday celebrations, the first was going out for tea for my Nannie's birthday and the second was one of my friends 21st Party, where loads of folk were dressed up in different characters. The week after it was Valentines weekend and I was busy helping out at Comic-Con themed Youth Group night and seen Deadpool on the Friday. On the Saturday, Darren and I had a day down at the beach in Aberdeen at the Amusements and tea at TGI's, and afterwards came into town to look at the Spectra Light Festival that was on in Aberdeen that weekend. At the end of the month, to do with some uni work and also just wanting to get back out there, I had a trip to the local woods and got a bunch of pictures again, but also finally managed to take some 'flowy' ones!! 

Lastly in February I started hitting my stride again with creating more art/design work. One of the pieces I enjoyed working on the most this month, but hasn't really spanwed into much is the paintbrush with text on it. That piece was very inspired by James Victore (no surprise) and got me to think about how to apply something like ink or paint to an awkward surface. At the start of this post, I mentioned making some work that has spawned a new series. This series has pretty much been these inky illustrations with typography written into them. The whole process of creating these was kinda new to me and I honestly love how they look and can't wait to do more! Drawn on from these I ended up creating two laser cut pieces from wood that mimics the original illustrations.

Well, that was a pretty long catch up, so thanks if you read all the way to the end! Let me know below what you've been getting up to these past few months and I'll try not wait 3 months till my next post!