Artists & Illustrators Mag: Sketching People at Work

John and I have just come back from a lovely road-trip in the Scottish highlands, to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary. There was a huge pile of junk mail on the mat to welcome us home, but one biggish envelope amongst all the pizza-delivery flyers and credit-card sales pitches turned out to be far more welcome. 

Back in June, I was commissioned to write a 900-word article for Artists & Illustrators magazine. I do enjoy writing so, of course, I said YES. Two or three years back, someone from the magazine came to the studio - it was just after my Craftsy Class went live - and did a rather lovely interview about my children's illustration. Thing was, I was all excited about urban sketching at the time, which I naturally told them all about, so last year, they got in touch again, to ask me to write them a piece about that. 

Which is how come they were emailing yet again, earlier in the summer. They had come across my How to Sketch People blog post, so they were after something along those lines. But I had literally only just got back from my sketching residency in Australia, so I really wanted to write about that. Since I was mainly sketching people while I was in Australia anyway, it all fitted rather well. 

So, back to that envelope...

There's such a long gap between doing work and it coming out, it always comes as a lovely surprise when you finally get the finished article arrive in the post, all published and shiny. I was delighted with the fact that the article is spread across 3 pages and that they have used so many illustrations (though I suspect they may have had to cut some of the words to fit them all on). 

I can't recommend the magazine highly enough by the way - it has some really interesting features (and I'm not just saying that because I'm in it!)