The main thing in my life right now is that I'm about to start a 12 week course with Smart School (online learning resource set up by the creator of the Illustration Master Class, Rebecca Guay). The course is taught by none other than Iain McCaig and has a focus on world building and story telling. I cannot tell you how excited I am for this course. Yes, they're pricey but the class size is small and we get 3 hours of Iain's time live every week along with personal feedback. I've always been self taught; it's going to be awesome to actually have one of my art idols looking over my virtual shoulder for almost 3 months.
So my first pre-class assignment was to create a self portrait, based around the questions of what we wanted out of the course and what had stopped us doing it already ourselves. I wrote a small novel (me? really?) but the tldr version boiled down to me being very torn between two styles of working and basically being at a bit of a standstill because of it. Chains of my own doing, that are really becoming a burden that I need to let go of and focus on one thing for a while to get that elusive consistency in my work. The self portrait is a somewhat metaphorical representation of that. It's also not an easy painting for me to share - it feels intensely private letting others see my struggle, even in a still image.
