Wales, new art and Winners of Give Away announced!

Hello, I'm back from Wales and had an amazing yet challenging time. :-) We were lucky that the weather changed from grey, windy, rainy and blustery to sunny and blue sky for the most part of the week! Let me tell you this helps a lot when all of your life (for a week) is lived in a big grassy field and a tent. Ha ha.

We spent the week with another 70 people or so of all ages, this brought with it a lot of joy and also challenges. The challenges were met with the approach and consciousness of NVC (nonviolent communication) find out more here: www.cnvc.org. Some of the joys were the wonderful sense of connection and community; there was always someone to support you if you needed help, someone to empathise with you if you were in some kind of pain and an allround willingness to be open, honest, authentic and vulnerable.

We were joined by two amazing NVC trainers, Catherine Cadden and Jesse Wiens - who ran a lot of the sessions and brought through a lot of love, depth, experience and inspiration.

One of the things that was hard for me and Andy was to join in on some of the sessions as we were always busy with Dylan. I would've enjoyed more 'childcare' of some kind. They organised one session where volunteers looked after the little ones and Andy and I were able to go to another session just the two of us which was wonderful, but I would've liked more of that. This was, however, the first ever NVC Family camp of this kind in the UK so it's no wonder it had some teething issues. I hope for future ones that there will be more toddler activities/ nursery type things organised so that Andy and I can also join in on more sessions.

Another wonderful thing that happened was that Callum a 9 year old boy became good friends with Dylan. Dylan absolutely LOVED him and wouldn't leave his side if he could help it. I want to share pics but need to ask Callum's mum if that is ok first. :) Many other older children played with Dylan as well which was just awesome. Dylan had a really good time. Sadly on the last day he sprained his ankle though which was a shame, but overall he had a wonderful time.

Also, the nights were totally not as cold as they were in April. Hilariously because I was expecting it to be really cold I layered up really properly the first night and found that I was, get this; TOO HOT. Ha ha. So that was great. :) The nights were doable though the biggest challenge were the noises: wind, the sound of a little water stream behind us and sheep everywhere.

All in all it was an amazing experience. I'm so proud of myself to have done it, not to mention I found out I can actually survive with only 1 shower in a whole week, didn't think I could, haha!

Anyhoo, we're back now and I'm working hard on my next course Digital Dreams (still time to sign up if you haven't already! :)) and other bits for my sites. It's crazy busy!!

Oh, here is some new art I haven't shared yet on the blog. A new digital piece:



And some new art journal pages:











This is a new mixed media piece on watercolour paper:



And these are two completely different styles, intentionally so, the first is inspired by M.A. Wakeley:



I loved the process of this, as it was all abstract and mostly about combining colour it worked as a very meditative process. I really like the final page too. :)

The second one is inspired by Jesse Reno. I call his work: 'ugly pretty'. It's the kind of art (to me) that is in many ways not attractive, but due to the many many layers/ intricacies and incredible composition and attention to details becomes short from amazing. I liked trying to do something similar but come nowhere close his brilliance, clearly, still it was fun to try:



And now without further ado, here is the video with the outcome of the WINNERS OF THE GIVEAWAY!! Congrats to all winners, pls email me if you can asap to claim your price! :) Big hugs everyone and thank you so much for taking part in the give away and filling in my poll!

Thank you babyloos, keep on rocking. Be back soon. xoxo

PS. I'm here on twitter and I'm here on Facebook. xoxo