Easy Like Sunday Morning

Good morning!

If anyone’s tracking (I hope not) - I was supposed to post last Sunday, but we had just got back from a short trip to find a leak in our house (more on that later!) so I just didn’t quite have the energy! But there’s lots in this post to make up for it!

We had a lovely Easter break for a few days at a yurt in Stamford. We were super lucky with amazing weather while we were there, and it was a really lovely, relaxing few days! Highly recommend Stamford if you like quaint streets, cute independent shops (including a maze-like bookshop!) and lots of cafes!

Behind the Scenes

Lots of behind the scenes from my sketchbooks this week!

Our little break gave me lots of time to play around with watercolours more. In particular, I was paying more attention to light and shadow, seeing if I could underpaint blues and yellow/oranges for it, as well as leaving white space for highlights.

If you follow me on Instagram you might have also seen Rhubarb and Custard - a comic I’ve been working on!

In one of the final pages of this chapter of the comic I introduce ‘The Temple of Snow’. Of course before drawing it I needed to work out what it looks like - especially as they’ll be exploring there later on! So I did lots of studies and sketches beforehand.

Here are some older character development pages as well as a test panel I did at the very beginning of the project, too!

Finally, I also doodled this little set of characters!

House Stuff

More house improvements this month; some planned, some unfortunately unplanned.

Firstly, unplanned - we came back from holiday to find a very suspicious water stain in the coving downstairs.

It took a day of exploration (i.e. lots of drilling holes and taking apart walls) to find out a shower pipe was leaking inside a wall upstairs and dripping down into the ceiling. Not a very fun surprise! But a big thank you to my fiance’s Dad for coming over and sorting it out for us!

In lighter news, we also knocked down a wall and took up half the very large patio outside so we now have loads more space for plants and greenery (and I can dig up some grass at the other end to grow veg and flowers)!

Food

Not the most photogenic round-up of food this week! We had lots of snacks and restaurant meals on holiday so I’ve been craving just nutritional home-cooked food since we got back.

Amongst other things I made Green Curry Chicken Noodles, one of my favourite recipes from ‘Ways with Noodles’ - a Wagamama book I’ve had for a million years. I also made Leek and Cannellini Bean soup with chilli oil from River Cottage: Veg Every Day, which doesn’t look great but tasted really good!

I’m also newly obsessed with this drink - Chinotto (or Chino), but it’s really hard to find! My daughter described it as ‘the worst drink she’s ever tasted’ but I think it’s amazing! I recommend trying it if you can find it and like bittersweet flavours.

Things I’ve Enjoyed This Week

• Ok, this was a few weeks ago but I can’t believe I forgot to mention it in my last post. We went to see Project Hail Mary and it was perfection! It’s one of my favourite books so I was really nervous about the film not getting things right, but it was absolutely spot on!

• It’s been weeks, I’m still playing and enjoying stupid amounts of Pokopia.

• Books! I finished Bloody Rose by Nicholas Eames. I love his writing but I just didn’t enjoy this one as much as Kings of the Wyld (the first in the series). Still excited for his next book though! I’ve moved on to the next Expanse book - Tiamat’s Wrath (#8!), which I’m already enjoying.

That’s all for now - have a great Sunday everyone!