Well, the Easter break is coming to an end, and it's been pretty good from a creative point of view. I've gone out and done quite a bit of drawing and have got about halfway with the rough pictures for my Tortoise and Hare story. Yesterday I went to a drawing meetup in the National Gallery and met a few other artists, including a few who made me look like a complete amateur by comparison. I copied Seurat's The Bathers and a country scene by Constable and later went and drew a motor scooter in the Museum of London.
One of the people I met at the National Gallery was a very gifted artist who's got quite a bit of work on Instagram and, I've discovered, his own website (https://artbellinsky.com). We had a very interesting conversation about the lack of proper artistic training in schools in this country - he's self-taught, although you wouldn't think that to look at his work - and the homogeneous quality of a lot of professional illustration these days. I've noticed an awful lot of very Disney-looking pictures popping up on Deviantart and other gallery websites, which Javier (that's his name) said is because all the paid and steady work would be at Disney now. He also mentioned DC and Marvel, and although there's a bit more scope for individuality with them, there's still a lot of stuff put out by them that reuses the same reference material over and over (see my previous rant about this on this blog).
It's occurred to me that this site needs an update as I've done nothing with the design of it for quite a long time. They say if it ain't broke don't fix it, but on the internet if you don't make even an occasional cosmetic change it can look to people on the outside like you just don't care.