My journey to a career in illustration

Early life

I grew up in a village in County Durham in the North East of England as the only child of two primary school teachers. As a child, my interests ranged from music to arts and crafts, although I absorbed the idea that if I wanted to succeed, a focus on more purely academic subjects was key. Holidays were spent camping on the Northumberland coast or hiking the fells of the Lake District as well as weekend outings to places of historic interest from the Roman Wall to Escomb Village Church (the oldest complete Saxon church in the UK), to Kilhope Lead Mining Museum.

These experiences fostered:

• an interest in history – I spent a year working at the Beamish Open Air Museum before taking a degree in History at Durham University. My degree was wide-ranging in the options for historical focus and I was able to study a range of topics focusing on the art, architecture and culture of different historical periods. In the first three years after graduating I explored these interests further by working for an MA in Art History through the Open University;

• an appreciation for the landscape and the natural world more broadly, which grew into a lifelong commitment to Environmentalism;

• a deep and abiding passion for the North of England as a place.

My first career

From Durham, I went on to spend 12 years working in university administration at the University of Oxford. It was here that I was able to re-connect with my creative side by taking courses in graphic design principles and software, as well as having the experience of working with and learning from the University’s in-house design specialists. I discovered that I loved both writing and design, and that I enjoyed working to a brief to create materials that solved a communications problem. Outside of work I found a husband, started a family, discovered the joys of growing, harvesting, preserving and cooking my own food, and continued to experiment with a range of different crafty hobbies, from sewing and knitting, to linocut printing.

I left my last role at Oxford (heading up the Alumni Relations communications team) to work as the Head of Legacy Marketing for the National Trust. Whilst I absolutely loved working for the Trust and all it stands for – caring for the Nation’s cultural and natural heritage – the role took me further away from the creative tasks I had enjoyed so much when working at Oxford – although it did give me the opportunity to educate people on what constituted the ‘North’ of England. After 5 amazing but incredibly busy and stress-filled years (anyone working in the charity sector will tell you that whilst the work is meaningful and fulfilling, it is also never-ending and under-resourced) – and with a husband feeling similarly bruised by his work – we decided to uproot from the South East and move with our daughter to North Northumberland.

A major relocation and the start of a big change

We chose Berwick-upon-Tweed as our base, as it best combined the things we were looking for – a small-town setting with a mainline train station (as we have never owned a car), coast and countryside literally on our doorstep and the opportunity to create an ‘eco-home’ so that we could continue to live as sustainably as possible. It also happened to be as far North as you can possibly go in England, before hitting Scotland!

The idea was also to take a career break, to re-focus on the things we enjoyed doing and to see if we could make a living from it. Unfortunately, we spent slightly more than we’d expected on retrofitting our 1950s property with insulation, underfloor heating, an Air Source Heat Pump and solar panels and so were, by necessity, forced back to work. I spent 10-months working for the University of Newcastle, back in a hands-on Communications role covering a period of maternity leave. It was great to get back to designing and writing and thinking about audiences and so when my contract ended (and my husband had found a job in which he was reasonably happy), I decided that I wanted to try my hand at a creative career.

Since then, I have spent some time re-learning how to draw and paint, and taking online and in-person courses on everything from how to draw seabirds to architectural sketching and surface pattern design. I’ve started to create artwork that is inspired by, and rooted in, the natural and cultural landscape around me. And I’ve never been happier.

Now all that’s left is to somehow turn this into a career…