Just what you needed to hear

I've been doing a course on Instagram, trying to improve my photography and Instagram engagement in general. It's challenging, fun, inspiring, and frustrating, like most things are when you're learning something new. Then today, someone else in the course shared this video with the class.

I'd heard of this little piece by Ira Glass before, but had never actually taken it in myself. If you're struggling with trying to be creative - or really, with trying to be good at anything in life - and you feel like you're just not up to scratch, do yourself a favour and spend two minutes listening to this. (If you can't see the video below, click this link to find it in Vimeo).

It just might be exactly what you needed to hear.

THE GAP by Ira Glass from Daniel Sax on Vimeo.

On self doubt

Oh hey. I have illustrated a children's book! It's called Grandad and the Baby Dolphin, and was written by the very talented Wendy Milner. The book will come out in November this year, and you can find out more (or pre-order a copy) here.

I am simultaneously proud and embarrassed to share these pictures with you.

Self doubt is a funny thing, isn't it. You do your very best and at some level (an important level!) you are proud of what you have done. And then on the other hand you look at your own work and then you look at what everyone else is doing and suddenly you feel like a complete fraud. Not to mention a failure.

Sound familiar? I feel like maybe crippling self-doubt is the default position of creatives. And by "creatives" I mean anyone who steps out into the public with something they have made: writers, artists, entrepreneurs, researchers... you name it. We all question ourselves, our abilities, our capacity, all the time but especially at the eleventh hour.

I have to fight my self-deprecating instincts as I share these illustrations with you. I hold myself up against the pantheon of talented, experienced illustrators in the children's book-publishing world and frankly I feel absurd.

Last week when Wendy said "We are finished!" and sent me a digital proof of the book, I vibrated with pride all evening. I kept looking through the images and reading them alongside her wonderful story and I felt as though together, we had created something really special.

That lasted for several hours, until I went to bed.

Then I closed my eyes and, immediately in my imagination, the whole world sat in a stadium, me alone and spotlit on a field way below, and everybody bellowed "WHO ARE YOU to think you could illustrate ANYTHING?" I am a writer, not an artist, and my sleepy self knew it. So did everybody else. "DERIVATIVE," the World shouted from the stands, "NAIVE." And "BORING" and "UNIMAGINATIVE" and "AMATEUR."

But do you know what? Get thee behind me, Naomi's Imagination World. I, like so many creative people before me and so many more to come, am going to own what I have made, and own it with pride. Wendy's prose is flawless. Her story is beautiful, and engaging, and entertaining, in all the right parts. I told it to my children for the first time a little while ago, holding up my paintings as I went along, and their simple response at the end was, "Again?"

And I am an illustrator. There, I will say it. I am a children's book illustrator, and I am lucky enough that my first book illustration project was for something as special as this beautifully-written tale of love and family and caring and joy.

I bet you are creative, too. Do you struggle to own it, trust it, believe in it? What should you be proud of today?

All in good time

Pulling out towering, still-flowering cosmos, taller than my head. Shaking the soil from the roots. Lopping dead flowers and seed-heads from a hundred different plants, tossing them into the garden bed to nestle and rest and seed to grow again another season.

Cutting away the dead and decomposing once-green things that had suffocated beneath the cosmos’ enthusiasm. Gently tending, trimming, clearing, watering, anything that had somehow survived in the floral dark. Training the climbing roses up and over fence and pole, and cutting back the potato-vine, inviting flowers.

Tending, training, trimming, trusting. It is a precursor to the big winter cut-back, settling the plants for rest and eventual rejuvenation. The autumn harvest, the garden clean, planting and sowing for fresh new blooms in spring.

And in life, the closing off of long-worked projects, the handing over of harvest, a preparation for hard-earned rest (learning to say no!) and hopes of new growth to begin again. All in good time.

Trilogy

I'm a little late to this party so forgive me if I'm sharing old news here and, if that's the case, feel free to skip right on past this post... but I finally just watched the Sia/Maddie Ziegler music-video trilogy back-to-back, in order, and it broke my brain.

In a good way.

To call these videos controversial is somewhat of an understatement, considering the kinds of criticism heaped upon them from some quarters, especially once the second video (the one in which Maddie plays some kind of inside-the-mind wolf opposite Shia LaBeouf) was released. (And then I came across a website that was going on and on about something called monarch mind control. What even?).

On the other hand I read this piece about what Sia has created on Noisey and I have to say, I agree:

"Sia’s album campaign—the videos, the performances, the responses and the counter-responses—has in itself been one of the most spectacular pieces of contemporary populist art, personally revealing, visually sensational, and entirely functional, as it served, at least in the first place, as a way for Sia to disguise her own face."

I found the videos disturbing, too, but entirely in the way that (I believe) they were intended to be. Each video features pre-teen dancing prodigy Maddie Ziegler portraying... I guess... an inner Sia? An inner Sia battling - often physically - with her inner demons, the thoughts and voices that twist and torture her. Their musical collaboration is profoundly moving, pared back, confronting, and truly beautiful.

And oh my goodness, the video for the third and final track (Big Girls Cry) is something beyond. That torturous battle: the voices within, her gradual descent, all played out on the outside and exposed for us to see... it is astonishing.

Honestly I'm a bit breathless.

Aftermath

Burnt out sparklers are bundled on the table outside. Two champagne glasses sit in the washing up.

The drying Christmas tree is outside on the front porch, awaiting its scheduled Council pick-up. A thousand pine needles have been swept from the lounge-room floor and two hand-painted nut-crackers, 60 tiny sleigh-bells, one giant musical snow-globe, three china Santas, two tangled ropes of twinkle-lights and a sizeable stack of Christmas-themed story-books and DVDs have all been packed neatly away, to hibernate for the next 11 months until we are ready to start breathing pine and cranberries again.

It feels cathartic. After all the chaos that was December, and all of 2015 really, I couldn't wait to pack and discard and clean.

I didn't love 2015, to be honest. Which is unfair to all the great things that happened and all the wonderful people who populated my year. After all, I am incredibly blessed and I have the kind of life and home and family and friends that people dream of having. The kind of life that, once upon a time, I dreamed of having.

But my dad once told me that, psychologically, you needed to hear 10 good things about yourself to negate just one criticism you might receive. I feel like maybe the same could be said about a perception of a year. Plenty of good things happened during 2015. But some pretty awful things happened, too, and maybe my subconscious needed them to be outweighed by good things 10 to one in order for me to feel like this was a "good year." It's not smart, it's not logical, but the bad things that happened do seem to dominate my memories and emotions when I think about the past 12 months.

Aside from that, I kind feel like I spent most of 2015 trying and failing to catch up. The whole year spiralled out of my grasp and I spent every other day feeling like a failure, with ever-stretching deadlines, ever-mounting work briefs, to-do lists un-ticked, big work-events in our home (the washing up, oh! the washing up!), and rushing and herding my over-tired children from one engagement to the next, running late for daycare late for ballet lessons late for music lessons... late for life.

I don't want 2016 to be the same.

I want to notice more things, appreciate more good things. I want to really commit myself to doing the things I love, and to get better at saying "no" to the things I don't love. I want to help, love, play-with, inspire, educate and just watch my children grow up. Even when sad things happen, I want to take the time to grieve.

I have some thoughts on how I might work towards this in the coming 12 months, and I'll share them on here shortly. But in the meantime, I just wanted to stop by and say hi, and to share these thoughts of mine, for what they're worth.

Happy New Year to you and yours! Love, Naomi x0

ps. I thought this was a pretty great start on preparing for the New Year

Creative project: Grandad stories

I have some exciting news to share. I have been invited to illustrate a children's book! I'm collaborating with the incredibly talented Wendy Milner, a professional writer who has just completed her first piece of children's fiction.

It is a beautiful (and true!) story called "Grandad and the Baby Dolphin." The Grandad of the story, Wendy's father, was a cray-fisherman off the Western Australian coast. While out at sea one day, he came across a baby dolphin in trouble. The dolphin was tangled in ropes and was slowly sinking beneath the salt waves. Grandad and his fellow fishermen were determined to rescue the baby dolphin, but what happened next amazed them all…

These are some sneak peeks and close-ups of my work-in-progress on the illustrations. If you'd like to know more about this lovely story (and others to come), Wendy has built a website for us, which you can find at Grandad Stories. You can also read her personal blog at Blink Blackburn.

Have you been working on anything new? I'd love to hear about it!

Weekend links

Hello! Happy Friday! Is it just me or is this weekend taking a re--a--lly long time to roll around? We are off to the Frankie Garage Sale tomorrow, assuming I succeed in getting the kids out of the house before it finishes. Other than that, I have a big pile of Halloween craft to complete, in order to get it into the post to HOPEFULLY  make it to its destination before the 31st. What are your plans for the weekend? Here are some links for your viewing and reading pleasure.

* What a delicious twist on the old-fashioned toffee-apples: bacon caramel apples

* On my to-get and to-read list: 1. Indoor Green: Living With Plants, 2. The Creativity Challenge: Design, Experiment, Test, Innovate, Build, Create, Inspire, and Unleash Your Genius

* A blind date with a book

* Really beautiful wedding suit idea

* Magical Christmas markets in Europe. Oh, to dream...

* Nature + cut-out shapes. I'm not doing this art project justice. Just look at the link!

* Apple butter sounds pretty delicious but I like this post best because of the list of "Things That Sound Like Fun with Kids, But Are Actually Not at All." I can COMPLETELY relate

* Desperate to try bonfire eggs!

* The vulnerability hangover. Sound familiar? (Me too)

* A reader Anke sent me this link when I announced my decision to quit Facebook. It's a pretty great read

* Halloween candy bark looks easy to make and wickedly delicious

And now, to see you into the weekend, I present Scout, lost in the groove. Man I love this kid!

A video posted by Naomi Bulger (@naomibulger) on Oct 21, 2015 at 6:47pm PDT

Image credit: photograph by Miguel Gomez, licensed for unrestricted use under Creative Commons

20 ways to find creative inspiration when you're ready to give up

Sometimes the ideas flow easily, and creativity is pure joy. Other times, finding your creative path is like wading through syrup (only not sweet, either). Don't give up! Here are 20 ways I use to cut through, depending on what I'm going through and what I need. Maybe one or two of them will work for you, too.

Good luck! Naomi xo

ps. It's probably best NOT to approach these with whatever is stumping you front-of-mind. Try not to be strategic. Give your brain a little holiday, and let it just follow what ever paths these activities take it. You might find an unexpected solution to your problem and, if not, at least you will return to it refreshed, having seen and/or done something different and uplifting.

* Take a walk while listening to music * Work in your garden, or pot some indoor plants *  Keep an “ideas journal.” One that makes it easy for you to write AND draw * This is a silly and fun ideas generator that sometimes actually works * Look through old reference picture-books (like old encyclopaedias) * Join the adult colouring trend * Shake things up. Do something out of your comfort zone * Learn a new skill. This will teach you how to make anything * Browse through second-hand shops and markets * Meditate for five minutes a day. Here’s how * Go to a cafe by yourself. Listen to other conversations. Write 200 words of anything at all in your notebook * Listen to some TED talks * Take your camera for a walk. Notice things differently through the lens * Turn off all your electronics. Be completely present in the moment * Turn your electronics back on. Allow yourself to get lost in Pinterest and Instagram: follow anything that takes your fancy * Explore this list of tools for creating ideas * Keep a dream journal and write down your dreams the moment you wake up * Follow the Swiss Miss blog to see what other creatives are doing * Read more books * Visit an art gallery

Wooden letterbox with a WiFi-connected printer inside

Hold onto your hats because I think I have found the best child's toy ever invented. It's fun, it's educational, it builds relationships, it uses technology to create real connections, and it's super cute!

Meet Turtle Mail, a wooden letterbox that can deliver real-time printed messages to your children. It contains an embedded thermal printer and is WiFi connected, so family and friends can send the children they love special messages from their mobiles or computers.

For us, this would be amazing! Mr B works very long hours, and is most often at work before our children wake up, and home long after they are in bed. Both sets of grandparents live a long way away, and the kids adore them but rarely get to see them. To enable parents and grandparents to surprise the children by sending little messages to their own "postbox" at any time during the day would be incredibly special, not to mention a lot of fun for the kids.

For security, parents have complete control over who will be allowed to send content to their children. They can send both text and images, and there are other apps that extend the play experience, like interactive Turtle Mail activities and characters, and a super-cute function with which you can "register" your child's favourite toy, and the toy can then send them messages.

Turtle Mail is part of a crowd-funding campaign that's about half way through, and half way towards its financial target. In case you don't know, crowd funding is when you pledge to make a donation to help a great idea achieve fruition - in this case the manufacture and distribution of Turtle Mail - but you only actually pay the money if the full target is reached within the stated timeframe. In return for your pledge, you also get a number of rewards.

Mr B and I made a pledge as soon as we saw this campaign, because we could easily see how incredible this toy would be for our family. So I really, REALLY hope the campaign reaches its target, so we can get our hands on our own Turtle Mail! If you want to take a look and maybe help support this exciting new, interactive toy, all the details are on their Kickstarter page (but be quick because there are only a couple of weeks left).

Artist Lorraine Loots on surviving a 365-day project, and beyond

South African artist Lorraine Loots is my Instagram crush. She paints highly-detailed, hyperrealistic watercolour works on a daily basis, most of which would fit inside a five-cent coin. Very appropriately, she calls her work "paintings for ants."

"The images vary from eight to 30 millimetres in diameter," Lorraine explains. "When I started doing miniatures, people would say, 'Oh that's nice. But what would you do with something that small?' I just started saying they were made for ants."

Lorraine's work is beautiful, but her output is phenomenal. She started painting her miniatures in 2013, as part of a 365-day project. "The plan was simply that I would set aside an hour a day outside of my 'real job' to complete an artwork," she says.

"Initially, I thought of the project as a massive challenge, like a marathon or something I would be relieved to have survived. And it really was. But it also became this meditative time; a quiet and almost sacred part of each day. And as the days went by and the end came closer, I got sadder and sadder thinking that I'd have to stop. And then I realised that the project was mine, that I was the one who had made it up in the first place, and if I wanted to keep doing it, I could. And so I did."

Since those early days, the response to Lorraine's "paintings for ants" has been so positive that they have now become her full-time job. Each miniature takes between six and eight hours to paint - sometimes more - and Lorraine continues to create a new one every day.

"Some days are really hard. I think the pressure of having to create something for someone every single day, to put it out there into the world, the idea of never having a day off, it all starts to affect you on a subconscious level. There have been difficult days. I've been so sick that I was only able to drag myself out of the bed for that hour it takes to do the painting, and it's taken all my willpower. We lost a close family member on the last day of 2013's project, the day before I was going to take on 2014. That was incredibly hard. Life just goes on and sometimes you have to make big sacrifices if you want to stay committed.

"But the incredible feedback and the feeling of being one step closer to achieving a much bigger goal is what keeps me going. The reward is huge.

"I have a little travelling paint kit so as long as I have enough light, I can work anywhere. I've painted in some crazy places: a 26-hour bus trip, on the floor of our room in Paris, and in the foothills of the Himalayas."

To see more of Lorraine's work, or to snaffle an original miniature of your own, visit her website here, or follow her on Instagram at @lorraineloots.

All images provided by Lorraine, and used with permission