To the casual observer they just look like little unassuming black books. Most of them live in a drawer under my desk. There’s nothing especially astonishing about the 18 pocket moleskines when they’re stacked up. However, within them lies a private narrative I haven’t felt able to discuss before.

I think now it’s time to share a more honest, as-yet-unexpressed history about my watercolour practice. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do for two years—to give a fuller picture of what was really happening behind the clean, polished work I've been sharing daily on Instagram.

If you go back far enough in this blog or on my Instagram, you’ll see my tentative attempts in sketchbook no. 1 way back in 2015. I taught myself watercolours in the subsequent sketchbooks, learning from doing, learning from observing, learning from overworking, and learning from proportions that were way off. These posts I’ll be sharing will NOT be about how to keep sketchbooks or watercolour technique. They will be the much more personal story of WHY I accumulated so many sketchbooks. At the height of my sketchbook practice, during challenges like #100dayproject and #365daysofpaint, I was averaging a new sketchbook every 8 weeks.

Most days I did paint daily. Wherever I was and whatever I was feeling, I’d sit down with my pans and complete another page, then it post on Instagram with a brief explanation as to why I chose that object on that particular day, and I was fine with giving out that level of information.

In retrospect 4.5 years later, I have been able to connect the dots about their purpose in my life, especially during those early days. In truth, I started my first sketchbook out of unhappiness.When my son was 1 year old I decided to take a total break from illustration so I could spend time just being a mother. This break was to last 8 years and included having another child. I call them ‘my wilderness years’ as I was a stay at home mum juggling school runs, laundry and amusing a toddler with little creative activity.  In late 2013, I started taking online courses after that huge gap to bridge the gap in my skills. Although my then-husband was the main breadwinner, we were leading a precarious existence, being financially challenged most months.I used to buy and sell items on eBay, create home made curry kits at fairs to stretch our meager earnings. Often we drove our car despite the red ‘fill petrol’ flashing sign, and prayed there would just be enough. This scarcity was quite a problem when deciding which bill could be delayed for a month loner.

Even from these early stages, I knew that in order to create a viable income swiftly I’d be running an art business. Bearing in mind my Photoshop, Illustrator, and drawing skills were pretty rusty after 8 years, I threw myself into updating my skills and improving my technique. Most days that was quite traumatic. I felt like a dinosaur, plodding along coming to terms with new technology and online platforms (and working on an archaic Mac).  Everything I did was very much digital illustration-based—as long as I could create it quickly, I thought that was the key. Those days, I shared a table with my husband in our spare room, and often it seemed I was literally chained to that spot whenever I wasn’t looking after the kids or cooking or cleaning. 

I rarely bought anything for myself. Even art supplies had to be kept to a minimum. It was wild extravagance that I bought myself a secondhand Daler Rowney watercolour pan set in the spring of 2015 for my birthday. I also bought a Moleskine sketchbook, similar to the simple black notebooks I knew were favoured by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. The added bonus was it was very small, measuring just 13 x 21 cm. Never having painted in watercolours, I wanted to make it ‘easy’ for myself. However, that first sketchbook sat on a shelf in its protective plastic for may weeks.

Once I did start, I realised that keeping a sketchbook meant I could physically remove myself from the office for 20 or 30 minutes everyday and fully be in my own space away from any dramas. At that stage, my ex and I were in general panic mode trying to find money, and he didn’t appreciate me taking those 30 minutes out of my day when I ‘should’ have been working on my website or other things to establish my illustration career. I had become this frenzied woman who was was churning out art, learning about technical repeats and chasing that art licensing dream. I knew something didn’t sit right, something was absent from my constant digital illustration process. I felt like I had lost the connection between my hands and my art and my heart.

I would look forward to sitting down in my kitchen in the early afternoon. It was the brightest room in the house, whatever the time of year. I called it my cocoon room—even though it was unheated, I felt warm and safe there. There would be no kids, no interruptions, no expectations or duties. In its simplest form, it was just me, that clean page, and a box of colours. I painted whatever I’d found growing walking back from the school run, or something from inside my cupboards, or curiosities I had collected that were displayed around the house. Those ornaments, teacups, books, tins of fish all nestled in this warm and protective environment where I didn’t have to pretend to be anything but myself. 

By working in silence, concentrating on the task at hand on those tiny pages, I felt no judgment or quarrel. It felt like I had access to a purer part of me, because I was unburdened by the weight of many problems. It didn’t seem logical to my ex, who felt my sketchbook time was an inappropriate or ‘profitable’ use of my resources, because it wasn’t a directly revenue-generating activity.

Yet without realising it, I had begun an investment in my future on many, many levels. It’s quite ironic that this solitary pastime I carved out for myself, at the time separated from my illustration business, would eventually become a great asset. Sketchbooks nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and beyond would be among the resources that I clung to as I faced massive upheavals and challenges. I could not have guessed that this safe, quiet place I cultivated with my sketchbooks would literally save my sanity in the coming months and years.

Little did I know, they were to become the foundation for some big, much-needed changes.