A Happy Book Company summer in my garden of eden - part 1

Reflections on summer 2024

I wrote this post back in October and totally forgot to publish it. Perhaps it will bring some summer sunshine to a grey winter day. Let’s see shall we.

As the season began to turn I was prompted to reflect on the summer and what a creative time it has been for The Happy Book Company. Here is 1 to 7 (of 14) of my creative summer highlights. Keep an eye out for part 2 soon. Enjoy!

1. The Eden Project

July kicked off with a gig at The Eden Project in Cornwall, how cool is that? The National, one of my favourite bands, playing outside in the beautiful evening sun in this most spectacular setting.

Although I’m obsessed with drawing tropical greenhouses, this wasn’t the creative focus of this experience. At Eden I learned about the founder, Tim Smit, who had the audacity to dream up a tropical botanical experience in an old Cornish quarry. Everyone called him bonkers but he made it happen against all odds.

How inspiring.

I like to make slightly ‘out there’ books, like Queen Of The Stars which compares the life cycle of a star-loving girl to the life cycle of a star. Lots of people have told me it’s ‘too much’/ ‘too existential’/ ‘too complex’. Maybe that’s what people told Tim Smit as well?

Watch this space for some Queen Of The Stars action in 2025…

2. Drawing outside with friends

A big part of my summer was about going outside in the sun with my sketchbook. I made it routine on my Thursdays off work to head into Bath to draw. I’d text a few drawing friends in the morning to see if anyone wanted to join and off I’d go.

I spent hours sat in Abbey Square, the Royal Crescent, and Kingsmead Boston Tea Party Cafe, taking in the atmosphere and attempting to get some of it down on paper. And a few magical things happened:

1. I fell in love with my home city

2. I made my first zine about it

   
   

‘Drawings of Bath’ is available to buy in the Happy Book Company online shop, and I’m excited to develop some of these pictures into a new book about the vibrant city of Bath!

3. River swimming and Why I Swim

I really leaned into being a freelancer this summer. I may not have stability of income from The Happy Book Company all the time, but I DO have flexibility of schedule. So if the sun is shining, I’m going to be sat with my sketchbook by the river in Farleigh Hungerford.

One of Somerset’s premier wild swimming spots turns into an inland beach around June each year until the good weather runs out. Families run riot in the field next to the river and it’s such a joy to watch kids launching themselves off the rope swing.

My picture book Why I Swim highlights the joy of swimming from a woman’s perspective. This summer I started to remember what it’s like to be a kid in a river...and it' is so much fun! Serene swimming is swapped for pirates, mermaids, and rafts made from trees. Perhaps I’ll make a book about it?

4. Live music

This was a great summer of gigs for this Happy Book Lady, and I took so much creative inspiration from these performances.

Seeing LCD SoundSystem (the hubby’s fave band ever) at All points East festival was a life highlight. Their “dance-punk-electro-rock” music is like nothing I’ve heard before. But it was their “we don’t care if you like this or not, we’re having the time of our life” stage presence which rocked me to my core. They were playing that gig for them. Not for the tens of thousands of people who had come to enjoy it.

Mythic.

Last night we went to Strange Brew in Bristol to watch Hailaker, a melancholy indie-folk duet who love recording beautiful music and hate playing live. They struggled to chat with the audience between tracks, and forgot the words to most of their songs.

As a Hailaker fan I would have been so interested to hear anything they had to say about their music/ tour/ why they wrote the songs/ their lives at the moment. But they acted as if they didn’t think we’d want to know all of that.

Not so mythic.

I’m sometimes reluctant to share my own creative process thinking “who would want to know this?” But for anyone whose interested in my work this is probably exactly what they want to know. Learning things.

5. London weekends and Look Up! London

With quieter work weeks in the uni holidays I found myself with more energy for trips out on the weekend. With time back on my hands again after the MA I had the great pleasure of catching up with friends in London. Between coffees, pastries, and playparks I snuck in some fab drawing trips to some bucket-list landmarks like Borough Market.

A invite from Bath’s Royal Crescent museum to run portrait drawing workshops inspired a research trip to the National Portrait Gallery. In all honesty I used to think that portraits were boring. But tasked with drawing them I noticed so much fascinating stuff! A sneaky smirk, a strange object, a steely stare. It really peaked my interest in character which is my main area of focus in my practice at the moment.

I also visited my favourite, the Tate Britain, for a drawing trip with my friend Simona. We were surprised and delighted to spend the afternoon drawing the Jamaican festival taking place in and around the gallery. The reggae/ dub soundtrack injected some new life into our pictures and we just couldn’t stop drawing!

Then I made a zine about it all - available in the Happy Book Company shop.

6. Becoming a gardener

I’ve been wanting to bring my love of colour to our garden for some time now, but an overwhelm of information and fear of failure has kept me from taking the leap for years. But as my lovely husband finished some epic landscaping on our back yard this year, I decided it was time to face my fears and get my hands dirty.

How’s it going you say?

Well, I planted some bedding plants at the end of July and have managed not to kill them all yet. I’m very proud. [December update - my flowers lasted till the first frost in late November!!!] Next year I think I'll be even more ambitious with a coordinated teal, orange and yellow Happy Book Company colour scheme. Watch this space.

7. Life drawing

It’s been delightful returning to Bath Artist Studios on Monday evenings for 3 hours (well, 2 hours and a very important tea break). It’s so nice to sit still and draw one thing for a really long time.

I’ve been reading “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards where she highlights the magic of tapping into this lesser used half of our big ‘ol brain. By using the right side we can learn to draw what we actually see, not just what we think we see.

It’s pretty cool to learn how to see at the age of 36.

Sketchbook zines are available until the end of 2024 from my online happy book shop.

Why I Swim is currently out on submission with my amazing agent Jessica Hare. If you’d like to be part of the creative team that brings it to life, do gimme a yell and we can make a real splash with this book (please excuse the terrible joke, if it’s even a joke, I’m running on low battery as 2024 comes to a close).

Stay tuned for numbers 8 through 14 of my creative summer in my very own Garden of Eden, coming soon.