Much as I love to fill my first blog post with a selection of awe inspiring finished illustrations, unfortunately things don’t seem to work that way at the start of anything and so the start of my residency has produced more ideas and experiments than pretty jpegs.

Music is still a large part of my life (before coming to ECA for a masters in illustration, I studied music in York) and recently I have been thinking a lot about possible ways to combine illustration with music. I am keen to explore different intersection points between art and music and have been really inspired by Klee and Kandinsky’s writing on the subject.

I remain a card carrying lover of children’s books, and have been playing around with a few new characters in my sketchbooks including fleecy (pictured) the perfect sheep who hits adolescents and with it, an awkwardly anarchic identity crisis phase. Then there’s Shaun, the slightly camp sausage dog with a very lurid taste in trousers and his wee pal, Mike, the hedgehog.

Finally, before I bore you all senseless with so much text and so few pictures, I would like to try and find ways to incorporate my love for travel and for people into my work this year. I loved exploring the impossibly broad theme of ‘personal identity’ in my degree show last year since it afforded me the opportunity to dip my feet into anthropology and social sciences, subjects that have always fascinated me. I would like to further explore this theme, looking into how digital technologies have affected how we percieve identity but also explore culture in a looser, less academic context through travel journals.

All this may change if someone offers me £1000000 to draw them a dog logo. Being a poor, starving artist may loose it’s novelty and I may sell my soul to capitalism. In the meantime though, watch this space and hopefully more jpegs will be present next time!

Jessica