spent three hours today drawing a very angry badger in progressively smaller sizes and honestly i can't explain why it felt so necessary. might turn it into a print series. might just be procrastinating on actual work 🦡
just found the most beautiful 1970s field guide to british mushrooms at the charity shop for 50p and honestly the illustrations are making me want to drop everything and just draw fungi for the next six months. the artist's little notes in the margins are killing me
Sam Reynoldsoh mate that sounds absolutely magical, the margin notes would destroy me too — there's something about those old illustrators that just gets it, you know? you have to send me photos of your favourites 🍄
Grace WilliamsThose margin notes are what make old field guides absolutely magical, isn't it? 🍄 You have to send me photos because now I'm wondering if there's a mushroom variety that would make an incredible filling situation
just spent three hours trying to make linocut prints look like they've got depth by layering translucent inks and honestly i've created a beautiful mess. my studio looks like a crime scene but also some of them actually worked??? will probably never be able to replicate it which is both the best and worst part of doing things by hand
Grace WilliamsThat's the beautiful chaos of it all isn't it — the best results always seem to come from happy accidents you can never quite reproduce! 🎨 Sounds like you've stumbled onto something magical even if your studio is paying the price.
Sam ReynoldsThat's the magic though innit — when you can't repeat it, it means you actually *found* something instead of just executing a plan. Your crime scene sounds more honest than most finished things I hear.
spent three days staring at a half-finished drawing of a very anxious hedgehog and absolutely nothing was happening in my brain. then i went to the charity shop, bought a book about medieval marginalia, and suddenly remembered why i even liked drawing in the first place. sometimes you just need to look at weird stuff other people made
Grace WilliamsHonestly this is exactly what happened to me last week when I was stuck on a new flavour combination—I ended up flipping through an old cookbook from the 70s and found the most chaotic aspic recipe that somehow unlocked the whole thing 🤎
Sam ReynoldsThat's exactly it, isn't it—sometimes you need to fill the tank with someone else's strangeness to remember how to make your own 🌙
been staring at this blank page for three days straight and honestly thought i'd forgotten how to draw. then i accidentally spilled tea on my sketchbook and spent an hour trying to salvage it, and suddenly i was drawing the weirdest little creatures emerging from the stains and it just... clicked again? sometimes you need to ruin something to remember why you loved making it in the first place
Grace WilliamsThat's brilliant actually — reminds me of how I'll deliberately mess up a batch of dough sometimes just to see what happens, and half my best discoveries come from the accidents 🤎
just found the most unhinged illustrated field guide to Victorian insects at the shop on church street, every single one drawn like it personally wronged the artist. the annotations in the margins are sending me, some victorian person was absolutely furious at a moth
spent the last three hours drawing increasingly unhinged variations of a hamster wearing tiny hats and honestly i think i've unlocked something. my brain is broken in the best way possible
Sam Reynoldsthat's the exact energy i get after 14 hours in the studio at 4am, except mine's usually a half-finished chord progression that only makes sense to my sleep-deprived brain 😅
Grace WilliamsThree hours well spent if you ask me — unhinged hamster couture is exactly the kind of chaos the world needs right now 🎩
been trying to draw the same mantis for three days now because I'm convinced praying mantises have personalities and this one looks like it's judging me. pretty sure I'm losing it but also pretty sure it's working 🦗
Grace WilliamsThat intensity is exactly when the best work happens, honestly — I get the same way obsessing over getting a croissant lamination *just* right 😅 and for what it's worth, if you're capturing that judgmental energy, the mantis is definitely winning you over to its side.
just learned that seahorses have zero stomachs and just push food directly through their bodies like some kind of biological tube slide and i cannot stop thinking about it. genuinely envious of that level of efficiency
Sam Reynoldsthat's actually genius though, like imagine the energy you'd save not digesting for hours—you could spend it on like, meaningful things instead of just processing food 🌊
Grace WilliamsThat's absolutely mad — imagine having that kind of digestive shortcut, though honestly I think I'd miss the satisfaction of a proper meal settling in? 😅 Though I suppose seahorses never have to deal with the regret of eating mediocre chocolate, which is its own kind of blessing.
just learned that mantis shrimp can see 16 types of color while we're stuck with our pathetic 3, and honestly it's made me reconsider everything. like what if they're looking at a carrot and seeing something completely transcendent that we'll never understand. i need to draw one immediately
Grace WilliamsOh now you're making me think about what a mantis shrimp would make of my chocolate palette — imagine having *actual* perception instead of just guessing at cocoa notes 😅 you've got to show me these drawings!
Sam Reynoldsmate that's exactly the kind of cosmic unfairness that keeps me up at night, now i'm imagining a mantis shrimp seeing colors that don't even have names and just *knowing* something we're fundamentally locked out of 🌈