On:

First of all, happy St Patrick’s day to y’all! :))
Here’s some music for you that always fills me up with energy, makes me want to jump high and scream of enthusiasm.

 

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaahaw!

I should listen to this tomorrow morning too I guess.
Breathe in, breathe out… I set sail tomorrow – well to be more accurate, I fly away, but still. 🙂
I don’t know if this ever becomes easier… it’s still scary and just because I know that things will be alright it doesn’t mean that I don’t have this strange tension in my chest. Well, the trick is to do it anyway I guess.

So the current plan is to get to Bologna, where a friend is going to greet me at the airport (I’m looking forward to seeing his grinning face :))), then I find my host, who I found through Couchsurfing and who was kind enough to offer to host me for the full 2 weeks I intend to stay in Bologna.
I contacted a few other people who I met there (and stayed with) last year, so one of these days I should be grabbing a drink with them too, but we’ll see how that goes.

Then later comes the actual reason, I’m going to Italy, the Bologna Children’s book fair.
There I’m hoping to show around my portfolio, take notes on what publishers seem to like, dislike, get to know what publishers would I be a right fit for and hoping to gather contacts who I could submit my work to for getting illustration jobs.

After the event, there’ll be a few days of breathing time and then with a good friend, who is also coming to the event, we’ll fly to Cologne and then get to her place. She invited me to stay with her for April, so I’m crashing at her place for a few weeks, hoping that we can gather both our notes from the event and after the overwhelm have passed, we can make some plans on how to move forward with this quest. 🙂 Mutual support and butt-kicking is ought to happen. 😀 It could be also fun to come up with a project together, but we’ll see how things will pan out.

No exact plans are set for my stay in Germany, but in the meantime there are things in motion that are calling me to Ireland again (best thing to talk about on St Paddy’s, eh? :D) so if things go well, I’ll have to look at convenient flight options and find my way back there again. If that happens, I’ll be promptly looking for a job over there and hope for the best. Fingers crossed. 🙂

There are a few plans for the further future as well, but as last year had it as well, I have about 1-1,5 month worth of somewhat solid plan and then the rest will happen dependent on how things keep rolling. The control is not entirely in my hand and that’s fine – I move with the flow of things, see what comes up and what makes most sense at the time.

Thanks a lot for all the great people, friends and family, who support me and allow this to be possible! You are great! <3

Image result for hug

On:

Here we are again…
I’m going to set off 2 weeks from now and step into uncertainty. I have rough ideas about where I should be in the second half or March, probably in April, where would I want to be in the end of May and then the second half of September and early October.
If I go with these ideas, it seems like I’m not really sitting still again this year.

It’s still all too vague and doesn’t really include a clear plan about how on earth will I be making money, but just gotta keep going.
The good thing is, that lately there seem to be more and more opportunities arising. I didn’t manage to land a gig yet, but friends link me things they come across and I get connected to people who are looking for illustrations. Then some of these people actually contact me, which means my work seems to be ‘good enough’. Quoting a price is hard, but in the past few weeks I’ve been gaining some experience in that. No jobs so far, but I’m waiting to hear back on a couple of things. Hope one of them works out. It’d be good to kick in this freelancing thing.

I’m also veeeery slowly building a body of work that I hope to turn into something.
Last year before I was setting off I thought I’d make an exhibition when I come home from the works I did on the road.
I didn’t do that… Not yet anyway, but looking back on many of the travel sketches, I believe that to be fine. I made a fair amount of bad sketches…
There is a pile of works that I’m happy with or proud of, but I didn’t have the power, nor did I think it would be a good investment to organize an exhibition. Maybe a little bit later… I’m going to gather myself together. The thought that appeared in my head is that I’d probably organize something like that once I have a small space of my own, although I have no idea how does that has anything to do with this… I’m going to think about it further…

For now it’s prepwork for the first jump. This weekend I’m supposed to wrap up the portfolio I want to get printed for the Bologna Children’s book fair. I aim to send it off to be printed on Monday. We’ll see how that goes. Most of the material is done, but there’s quite some adjusting to be done and I want to finish a couple of more little paintings as well. We shall see. I’m not going to beat myself up if I push it back a day, but I want to get done with it as soon as possible, so I can move on with other things.

I have to put some of my stuff back in boxes, buy a couple of things for the road, tidy up my laptop, finish a painting for someone, meet quite a few people.
Just keep going.. one step after the other. You’ll get there, wherever that is.