I live in a village in the middle of England, which nobody has ever heard of, with my partner Callum and our 2 terriers. It is about as far from a coast as you could get in England, sometimes that does make me a little bit sad. But our village is utterly lovely and our house is perched on the very top of a hill so we often feel like we are living in a treehouse.

 

On summer evenings we all like to squeeze on to our teeny-tiny balcony and peer down on the villagers passing below. It is an ideal spot for neighbourhood nosiness, a pastime we regularly enjoy as a family.  I love overhearing mundane and silly conversations in supermarkets about preferred soup flavours or bargain bin tenderstem broccoli. I could happily pass an afternoon in a library, aptly crouched behind the crime and mystery stand (maybe wearing a trench coat?) with a travel mug of tea and a sketchbook, spying on everyone. People are just peculiar and endlessly fascinating, I love watching them and I love drawing them. 

I used to draw obsessively as a child but after a fairly significant detour of about 20 years in which I found myself doing all sorts of odd jobs. I finally landed in a career in makeup. And that's what I've been doing for the past decade. That has led me into working in TV, theatre and fashion, doing some very fun campaigns and working with some great clients and very interesting and creative people. But I still felt the itch to draw and with my makeup work pausing over lockdown, I found the time to fall in love with art again. And so I'm in the process of experimenting and developing my illustration work while painting faces for a living. But the absolute dream is to one day write and illustrate my own children's books, including hopefully at least Christmas bestseller that will be made into a stop motion animation and played on boxing day! Hopefully every sketchbook page, accidental sip of paint water and disastrous drawing is taking me one step closer to achieving that.

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