NICOLA YOUNG

I was awake this morning around 5am, which sadly seems to have become a new routine.  This whole COVID thing is an almighty pain in the butt and I, like many others, have been hugely effected by the economic ramifications of the restrictions which hasn’t left much time for my art recently. Flicking through Instagram, I was green with envy at the number of posts from artists who have taken the leap and given up their full time jobs in favour of becoming full time artists. I’m not there yet, but it is still a dream.

Whilst it is a really tough time work wise, I am grateful to still be working and I have managed to get some time over the past few weeks so wanted to celebrate some achievements – albeit small ones

Learning New Stuff

My other achievement was to complete another handmade book.  I haven’t managed to watch all of the videos from Lorna Crane’s course ‘Discovering Your Visual Language’ but that was more of a conscious choice rather than lack of time.  When I do some of these courses I have a habit of racing through and not spending enough time on the practical exercises so with this one I wanted to take time. 

I also made this decision after completing the first book, which I shared in an earlier blog post.  I was happy with some of the pages but overall the book felt too busy so with this one I wanted more of a flow and experimenting with different materials. So, I rummaged around and found some handmade papers and started by staining the pages with coffee rather than paint.  Have to say it feels a lot more successful.

I did try uploading a video but WordPress wasn’t playing ball. You can view it here

The Business Side of Things

Whilst I’m still feeling my art in terms of setting myself to sell works, I did have one achievement this week which was to upload a few of my paintings onto ArtFinder – https://www.artfinder.com/nicola-young#/