How mama draws
14 November 2019
Many people ask me how I find time to draw, juggling 2 kids and a day job. Especially during the Inktober challenge, each drawing would take me around 3hrs to create. Here's a breakdown of a typical day...
12:00am - Just finished drawing the day's drawing. Check email notification from Sktchy regarding the selected photo for the following day's Inktober challenge.
1:00am - Go to bed thinking about it.
7:30am - Get ready for work and get kids ready for school / nursery
8:20am - Take Owen to school
8:45am - Arrive at work
2:45pm - Finish work
3:00pm - Park car near the nursery (spend 10 mins parking as I am so bad at it). Go to shop and get groceries, etc, if needed.
3:15pm - Come back to sit in car and start drawing on the iPad. This usually starts with me manipulating the photo on my phone to turn it into monochrome so I can better see the values. I often also tweak the exposure and black point to make it more dramatic. Splitting the screen on the iPad and putting the photo side by side with Procreate, I zoom out on the canvas to sketch a rough thumbnail for composition. I then zoom in and add more details either on the thumbnail or draw on a new layer over the previous draft.
3:40pm - Collect Harriet from nursery and walk with her to school to get Owen.
4:00pm - Collect Owen from his after-school club at school, and walk back to car or library. Then spend the rest of the time with the children.
5:00pm - Children watch telly. I start making dinner. Depending on what it is, I sometimes get to do more drawing while waiting for it to cook.
6:00pm - Peter comes home, we have dinner.
7:00pm - Get bath ready for children. I get to do some sneaky drawing while waiting for the bath to fill up. Though quite often I get too engrossed and overfill the bath!
9:00pm - Finally the rascals in bed. Clean up and do boring house stuff such as online shopping, pay bills etc.
9:30pm - Dedicated drawing time, yay!
11:30am - Peter giving up on me and gone to bed by himself.
12:00am - Finally finished drawing. Put on social media, and spend about 1hr distracted by things on social media and email.
1:00am - Go to bed exhausted but excited.
1:15am - Take a sneaky look on my phone in the dark to check how many 'likes' I got so far on social media.