Hello February! Let's focus...

Hello and welcome to February... What are your plans for this month?

After a lovely weekend of relaxing, cooking, walking, food and fun with friends I'm starting this new week and month with 'focus' as my theme. I've just started an 8 week meditation course which I am hoping will help me in this area. It's so easy to lose sight of what you are doing or why you are doing something and I noticed this when looking over the work I produced in January. My intention was to enter some competitions and to have more work that I can use for my greetings cards range. I don't really think that I managed to achieve this despite making a lot of work so I am really going to focus on this for the coming month and try to design with a product/audience in mind more often. Whilst it's great to just be creative, a sense of direction would be helpful too if I'm to achieve my intention of making this venture into a viable business.

I've drawn up my list of what I'd like to achieve over the next four weeks - below are my design related goals. I've based my plan for the year on Jessica Swift's Goals and Intention Kit which is an absolutely brilliant way to get yourself more organised and focus upon what you want to achieve. I bought her kit last year and stuck to using it for the whole year. I'm doing a few things slightly different now as I've found ways to do things that work better for me but I think Jessica's kit is fantastic and can't recommend it enough if you're looking for a tool that will help you succeed.

February Intentions

• Rethink my approach to building my portfolio and be more structured in my approach by considering  audience and product. More placement patterns and typography...
• Consider starting a motif library/resource. 
• Complete 28 patterns and 1 collection
• Do a February Pinterest
• Schedule in some drawing time away from the computer - outside of the house even? Exciting! 
• Buy a new timer!!
• Organise and tidy my workspace
• Challenge my tendency to 'hide' my work - be braver! Enter competitions, showcase my work.
• Limit time spent on Pinterest, social network and other procrastination tools. Vampires!
• Finish my Strawberry Thief collection 
• Get my greetings card idea MOVING!

I've already made a start on my February Pinterest collection, you can see it here and I'll obviously be adding to it throughout the month. I've been asked to design some butterfly notecards so that's my starting point for this month. I've always been drawn to indian patterns - in particular paisley type patterns so these will also be making an appearance too. 

So good luck with February!
Bye for now,
Frankie x