brb - climbing cringe mountain

+ career/life lessons from Mr Bingo (scroll for JOBZ)

What a fortnight it’s turnin’ out to be.

First up, we (The Good Ship Illustration) were invited to a private preview of the snazzy new Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in that there London last week.

But on our way to QB’s new hoose, we stumbled upon Mr Bingo’s shop.

I’ve been following Mr Bingo since the olden days (probs 2008 ye olde studying-animation-at-Newcastle-college Twitter-was-cool days?) and it was SO EXCITING to meet him in real life. You’ll be relieved to hear that I played it really cool and nonchalant. See fig. 1:

He was very friendly.

We were just peering in the window like illustration-creeps. He spotted us, waved us in and opened the shop so that we could have a proper look around. He’s normally only open on Fridays.

We somehow covered all-of-the-things in our 30-minute conversation. It would’ve made a BANGIN’ podcast episode. Alas. We didn’t record our chat about:

• The difference between being an illustrator and a fine artist

• His taking a year off, how much he’s loving having a bricks and mortar shop/studio

• It’s ok to be insulting middle class people cos he IS one, etc. etc.

We then moved on to the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration.

I made a wee carousel about it here:

Overall I thought it was great The new centre is brilliant. HOW GOOD to have a space to showcase illustration. It’s mad that there aren’t more places like this? The only downside was that I didn’t get 5 hours in the library to read.

ANYWAYS.

I’ve been feeling very crispy around the edges (I want to write more about this… because feeling frazzled while doing stuff you love so SO SOOO much feels ridiculous. Like what do you mean I’m exhausted from drawing pictures and talking to people and writing?? It’s utter madness.)

But here we are 😅 I’m crawling to the finish line that is the end of June.

Climbing Cringe Mountain with Jo Hutton

A few months ago I filmed a lovely podcast chat with Yoga For Tired People’s Jo Hutton. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts here, and it was even FILMED so you can watch it with your eyeballs too:

Right, I’m off to paint a window for Cameron ‘cos he’s running a pop up antique shop in Berwick for the next 2 weeks and I’ve convinced him to let me paint on the glass. Bwahahahaha.

See ya soon!

x Katie

p.s. Jobs. There are lots of illustration jobs: