What goes up must come down… it’s always hard to say goodbye after a visit, and I’m well and truly fed up with more than 20 years of living an ocean apart from half of my family.

But hey, that’s the life of the immigrant/expat, and you just get on with it.

Back to that mould-making failure

As I was writing this, I heard an amazingly salient phrase in a podcast – “never waste a failure”.

It was directed towards entrepreneurs and I immediately thought about the ways that I’ve learned from failure before, but I’m staring despondently at this mould that I thought would be the one, and wondering how to get my head back in the game and start all over.

So now I’m seriously having to think about everything I was considering about my working methods before: why I naturally gravitate to doing everything by hand and how I can get over that.

It’s a tug-of-war between the conceptual and the physical artwork that I go through all of the time, and to be honest it’s still wigging me out right now… but I’m just going to get over it and invest in some equipment.

Designing and publishing

Since the mouldmaking and comedown from family time I’ve had to jump into something completely different – creating journals – to fulfil two objectives:

• Cheer myself up by tackling a project on my long-list
• Create more recurring revenue

This project can cross over between my art business and my separate web publishing business, but I’m focusing on creating products for my other business first, since it’s the bigger one, and as it’s less reliant on imagery I should be able to create several different books that will form a single series.

Distractions are usually something I beat myself up over, but this time around I definitely need it!

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