The (second) most wonderful time of the year!!

Well, it certainly has been a while since I last posted. I have been following and loving all the bits you guys have been sharing over in the Brimbles Facebook Group  but I've been a bit AWOL. I got married at the beginning of October (yay!) so most of August and September saw me working away on candles, decorations and my bouquet as I decided to undertake most things myself. Phew! It was stressful and hardworking but boy did it teach me a thing or two!

(Photo curtesy of Anna Brim. I was too busy doing the getting married bit and I've not had the professional photographs back yet.)

For a while I've been struggling with creativity and I've continuously hit a block whenever the creative mojo strikes. I've had to learn to love and enjoy the process of crafting again, sometimes working creatively for you business can, sadly, sometimes starve and taint the artist within. The process becomes clinical, and unfortunately I have lost some love for it. Since the wedding though, I feel rejuvenated and I've decided to dedicate some more time for creating just for me. I've taken a couple of weeks off, closing my shop to create purely for me and to push and explore some ideas I'd placed on the back burner.

Autumn is probably my favourite season, with Winter coming an incredibly close second (mostly because of CHRISTMAS!). It's all the magical colours, the slight chill in the air, the feel of forthcoming rain, the squash and crunch of leaves underfoot. It is like the world opens up, and comes alive, shedding itself of what has come before and preparing itself for the new beginning in Spring. I feel like my soul vibrates to a different tune during the autumn, like I can breathe again. I can feel the inspiration bubbling away under the surface.

Following Anna's Autumn Doodle from last month's Patreon collage sheets, which pictured all her favourite things about the season, I decided to fetch my stamps and felt tips and give it a whirl. It feels like it's been a very long time since I did any of this!

Using stamps felt like a good way to go, it meant I could get creating a page, building volume and content quickly. All without the fear of how it would look, once it's down, it's down, no faffing back and forth about placement.

I have quite a collection of stamps, but there were a few Autumnal activities which I didn't have an appropriate stamp for, so I doodled a few in there too!

I ended up doing a bit of ghost stamping, which came about by mistake, since I dropped my inked stamp block onto the page and a little transferred. I thought I would roll with it and turn it into a feature. You'll notice it is a little funky around the tea bag haha! I've now filled

After getting stuck in with the stamping and colouring in, the creativity just kept on coming. This little lady came to mind after looking in the mirror. I often wear my dreads in a bun on the top of my head when I'm creating as they have a tendency to fall into paint, glue, glitter, whatever it is and the result is always a mess! J made the joke once that my dread bun looks like a cross between a pineapple and a pumpkin, and he's right.

Cartoony style art is something I'm really getting into, I'm not very good, I still really struggle with the looseness of it, but I'm getting there! I used a mixture of watercolour paint and pencils to create the texture of her hair and then outlined her using a 0.3 waterfast pigment liner. I felt she was missing something so I gave her some pumpkin leaf earrings too match her hair. I want to work a little more on faces so I'm going revisit some of Anna's early Patreon content where she gave some tips and tricks for drawing sketchy girls.

I'm now off to download and play with the next lot of collage sheets! Till next time guys xx