New website!
Hi and welcome to my new website!
Before the first lockdown I had been practicing in person at Ainsworths Homeopathic Pharmacy in London, and didn’t have to rely on a website very much for business. Now things are very different. My old website was horribly out of date and, as all my consultations have moved online, I desperately needed a new one.
At the beginning of the year I had started doing some rough sketchbook drawings from an Observer’s Book of Birds, which had belonged to my late father. I started off very timidly with pencil and eraser but gradually became more adventurous as I gained more confidence. I hadn’t drawn since primary school - a long time ago! I hadn’t particularly enjoyed or excelled at art then. I moved on from copying pictures of birds in a book to drawing our dog, along with all the challenges of drawing a moving, real life thing.
When lockdown began in March I was filling up sketchbooks with numerous daily drawings. With encouragement from my artist wife, Alice Wood, and our creative friends, I tentatively began posting them on Instagram and discovered a friendly community of illustrators and artists and I realised what the wife had been doing on her phone for hours! I joined in a weekly live Art Club draw-along with The Good Ship Illustration, Art training sessions run by three inspiring artist/illustrators, which gave me huge support and encouragement. As my drawing progressed and developed I signed up to their 6 week online course ‘Find your Creative Voice - Fly your Freak Flag’, for people of all abilities: novices, published illustrators and artists alike. I found this a transformational experience which gave me a real push forward in my development and understanding - like having an intense art college experience. Friends pointed out that my drawings would work well as screen prints so then I took two silk-screen printing courses at Sonsoles Print Studio in Peckham, London.
This new website features colourful images which began as black and white ink drawings of remedy bottles, an idea prompted by my wife, who suggested that we use my new-found creativity to make graphics for the website. My wife is an artist and designer and spends a lot of time doing magical and mysterious things with Photoshop (and which I am also desperate to learn!) The first image Alice made from my original drawings is the blue square above. It was made in Photoshop, in a similar way to the screen printing process, but with digital colour layers.
I would have struggled searching for impersonal stock images, which didn’t really mean anything to me, so I am very happy to be able to use my own drawings.
