Studio Snippets - What I've Been Making This Month (Patreon)

Hello everyone,

Come on in to my studio and let me show you what I've been making lately 🥰

The weather is getting warmer in Tasmania (while I'm sure it's getting colder for many of you in the northern hemisphere) which means I can spend more time outdoors and that always boosts my mood and creativity.

My partner Dan and I went for a lovely hike in the mountains last week, and despite seeing 5 snakes on the trail (a record for me) it was beautiful enough that I didn't mind. Besides, the snakes live there and I was just visiting.

I've been getting into acrylic painting lately and desperately wanted to make some big, colourful art for the walls of my new house, so I finally got around to painting a canvas!

It's big, and colourful, and I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I was a bit apprehensive because I don't have a lot of experience with painting, but I did some practising on some smaller canvases first and that helped me build up some confidence.

I also made a smaller but more detailed painting inspired by the rainforest, which initially I wanted to be quite abstract but that didn't look very good so I ended up adding more and more detail until I liked it. Now it sits above the coffee machine in the kitchen!

I'm really into making physical crafts at the moment, partly because I have a nice studio now and partly because it feels like the digital space is being a bit overrun by AI, so it's nice to just disconnect from the internet and make something real.

In a way, AI is encouraging me back to my sketchbook and craft supplies.

Recently I got out my sewing machine to make some curtains and ended up playing with some fabric scraps, and now I've accidentally unlocked a new craft obsession of making pictures from fabric.

I never got into quilting or sewing clothes because I don't like measuring things properly, but this style of sewing is so fun to me because I can just cut out shapes and sew over the edges.

I think they would make really cute pockets or patches on clothes!

I'm also still busy drawing in my sketchbook. I've been drawing lots for my second YouTube channel Mimimoo Draws where I post quiet, real-time art sessions, so that's been encouraging me to spend more time drawing cute things just for fun which I'm obviously loving.

And of course I'm still making digital art, probably about 3 times a month at the moment plus the work that I do for picture books. I'm struggling a little bit with posting on social media, partly because of AI and how easy it is now to just scrape digital art without permission at a much larger scale than in the past.

I think my way around it will be to post images of my digital art while I hold it on my iPad rather than posting the original image straight to Instagram, at least that way it isn't as high quality or detailed. Not a perfect solution, but a good starting point.

I'm currently illustrating the draft sketches for a book that will come out next year, and I had two books published last month!

They're both really sweet books that were really fun to draw - one is about a Christmas fairy (delightful) and the other is a about getting ready for bed (one of my favourite activities). Sometimes I have to pinch myself that I get to do this for work.

I think that's about all from my studio, it's been a creative month!

I hope you're doing well, thanks so much for stopping by 🥰

💖 Mimi