Stories from Summer

It's been a long summer this year, or at least it's felt long to me.  Lots has happened, good, bad, and somewhere in between, in a lot of different areas of life.  A strange season, and a bit of an emotional rollercoaster, but that's life for you.  Things can't be peaceful all the time or we'd be bored and never grow at all.
In some ways it's been a struggle, but as always there's been time to regroup too.  To take time out, to spend time with the people I care about, and to be contemplative, which is something I'm finding more and more essential...

... and to watch seals.

Seals!!!

So I'm gonna be a lazy bum...

... and just do a sketch dump, because I'm so busy right now, you guys.  It's just nuts.  So here you go...

Favourite's first - I've had this sitting on my desktop waiting to be coloured for ages.  I finally got it done!  Hopefully this will start a trend.

Next, a card for a friend's wedding.  Two friends actually.  Two amazing hippy-ish ceilidh-dancing friends who I love to bits got married to each other just last weekend.  I wish them all possible happiness.  And a houseboat.  This is the little wedding card I made for them. 

And lastly this random sketch from Greenbelt last year of a guy in a dinosaur onesie.  I don't know what it is, but if I were ever to get a onesie (which would be a dangerous thing to do as I'd never get out of it again) it would be a dino or dragon or some kind of giant lizard.

Summer 2012 - Greenbelt

So, where've I been?  Well when you see the amount of summer events I want to blog, you may understand why I've been away so long!

Firstly, after last year's successful experiment as a volunteer at the Greenbelt Festival, I decided to return as a regular camper.  Volunteering was a great intro to Greenbelt, but my hours meant I couldn't see everything I wanted to.  This year I saw A LOT.  In Case of Fire, Aradnha, Weapons of Sound, The Proclaimers, Speech Debelle, Hope and Social, Shlomo, Nitin Sawhney, Folk On, Seth Lakeman, The Imagined Village, Bellowhead, and that was just the music!

I went to talks that stretched my brain, split my sides over comedians, was challenged and awestruck by drama...  but if I'm giving you the highlights there's one thing I should mention first.

1. The MUD

Small magic

My housemate tells me that this blog makes it sound like I live in a magical fairyland.  Of course this isn't true...  except sometimes it kind of is.  I'm getting adept at finding it now.  Magic doesn't come to you if you sit indoors and hope wistfully, you have to go hunt it down.  Be prepared to look more closely at ordinary things than perhaps you normally would.  Take this weekend for example, when I went back to Norfolk for the day.  It's not often I get to go back to my home county (although my parents aren't originally from the area I consider myself a Norfolk girl by adoption).  I went home for a birthday party, but that wasn't until the evening so I spent the rest of the day at Weird and Wonderful Wood, a small festival in Haughley, Suffolk, that celebrates all things wood, and the folk that make them. 

Bank Holiday Funday

God bless the British and their pig-headed insistance on clinging to holidays they aren't really entitled to!  It's been a funny spring really; a very warm March, a very cold and rainy April, but with May (fingers crossed) the weather appears to be sorting itself out.  Hopefully just in time for my birthday, which is in a few weeks.

This Bank Holiday weekend has been a very full one for me; despite being ill for the best part of the week and not up to planning much for myself, several little adventures have just fallen into my lap so I've been riding piggy-back on those until I'm back to firing on all cylinders.  So in no particular order...

Jubilee Wood

Gouache, 15 mins

The bluebells are out!  I've been keeping an eye open and this week I saw a few so I decided to chance the wet weather and go check out my old walks.  Just as I got here the skies cleared for an hour or so, and returned just as I was ready to leave.