Lately I’ve been getting back in the groove with some surface pattern design. I’m building a decent collection over on Spoonflower there, check it out if you are interested in fabrics and wallpapers. Not really a person for niches, I’ll have a go at everything so there’s all sorts from large scale upholstery type fabrics to small scale quilting fabrics. These tend to be drawn digitally, I like a vector. Surface pattern design is great fun but it’s started to morph into designs for stationery and I have a few things in my Etsy store related to that – planner stickers, bookmarks, art prints – that sort of thing.

The other thing I like to do is paint watercolour illustrations of buildings – it’s usually an Irish Pub, but there’s an odd shop front, Dublin doorway or other interesting Irish building. There are some prints of those on the Etsy store also, more are always in the works and eventually everything will migrate to my clairebrennandesign.com website. I particularly love painting bricks for some reason. Psych students feel free to give me your assessment on that.

It’s time for me to begin building a career for myself again and so I’ve been working on plans for another small company, I’ll probably begin with small stationery items, but I wouldn’t rule out some more stamps – if inspiration strikes, and the fancy takes me. It will be great to have somewhere to share my ideas and journey towards being a viable illustrator and that’s where this blog comes in. Attempts were made to revive my old stamp company blog, but the google gods don’t appreciate it when you aren’t technically astute enough to remember decades old passwords and you know what? I think it’s better to have a fresh start some times, don’t you?

Anyhow, it’s lovely to see you here, and even if I only end up chatting to myself on the regular, sure that’s grand, and we will call it self care.

If you do want to know a bit more about my ‘journey’ take a gander at my first blog post here.