During lockdown I have been keeping a type of diary, sketching some illustrations based on the crazy isolated days we have been experiencing. There are self portraits, pictures of my daughter and dog. The image of an ice cream is because my daughter has autism and trying new food is hard for her – she tried ice cream, which was a new taste, texture and temperature and she liked it – I have been drawing these little victories to try and keep me optimistic in such strange times. The photo above is from one of our daily walks after we hasn’t let the house for quite a while.

Another thing I did was I took part in one of Joby Carter’s ‘Learn about Lettering’ courses. It was a 5 day course of 1 hour sessions learning the fundamentals of hand drawing letters.

Joby Carter is an artist from Carter’s Steam Fair, he is a traditional signwriter and fairground artist who paints all his signs by hand. I’m not going to share too much about what I learnt as it was a paid course and it wouldn’t be fair on them to share it for free! But it was all about measuring and how to build the letter.

As lettering has been such a weakness of mine I found it really helpful, I couldn’t believe I actually managed to draw these letters! I really enjoyed it. I would actually like to learn more about lettering and learn more about traditional signwriting as a craft!