In 2016, I decided to sketch every day for an entire year. And I did that! It was a big challenge to stick to but I did it! Since then, I've kept at my art in one way or another. It's been tricky between working full time and Being An Adult but I'm so glad I have a hobby that's all my own.

For my birthday this year, I asked for contributions towards a monthly drawing and watercolour class called 'Fur and Feathers' at the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh. I've done one or two classes before and had some very mixed results with them but I was excited to try this one because (as I'm sure is apparent by the number of zoo posts I've done over the years) I love animals. I have very little experience with painting at all but, I thought to myself, my love of animals will trump this!

So it turns out the drawing part was pretty straightforward, albeit more technical than I was used to; there was a lot of measuring using compasses and rulers and double checking references using a light box. As I have more of an affinity to illustration, this was a nice challenge to slow down and study the reference properly - a wild rabbit.

The less nice challenge was when we started to paint! What a remarkable learning curve. I'm grateful that I already had experience with the initial learning curve with drawing as that is what got me through the learning curve with this rabbit painting!

Each class, we'd observe the tutor do an expert replication with exact precision of a particular part of the rabbit. Then we'd go off to do the same (with varying results).

Fine details are what got me the most, requiring the precision of defusing a bomb except using a medium that in its nature is fluid and unpredictable.

But as they say, practice makes perfect. Having had time away from this bunny, I can safely say I don't hate it as much as when I shoved it into my bag once I decided I was finished with it! You can definitely tell it's a rabbit!

In December, we had a mini prompt in the form of this lil mouse.

I'm at the frustrating stage with any new art skill where I can now see the differences between my piece and an expert piece but don't have the skill level to do much about it!

Which means practice, practice, practice!

My course runs all the way to June so there's lots of time to improve still. In between classes I'll be trying my hand at more watercolours (like Cleadon Hills below that I painted for my mum for Christmas) so watch this space, I guess! Here's hoping that by the time June comes around I'll have come on leaps and bounds!

Continuing with The Year of Creativity, I decided to try my hand at paper flowers - or roses to be more specific!

This project is one of those I had put on the backburner for a rainy day. With it being the long weekend over Easter, I found myself with some spare time and although it is decidedly the opposite of a rainy day today (20C and sunny, yes please!) I got cracking.

I had most of what I needed lying around already but these flowers do call for a hot glue gun and crepe paper. Crepe paper is regular tissue paper that's been coated with sizing (a kind of glue) so it holds its form if you crease it. It's also a bit more durable than regular tissue paper which I needed as the paper would be getting wet. It's not that rare but did require a trip to Hobbycraft (which unfortunately for me is two bus journeys away - boo).

When I had returned home victorious and got started, it turns out a little crepe paper goes a long way. I bought three packs of white paper and I only used half of one for this trial attempt. At least I'm stocked up now for future flowers!

To begin, I cut out petals from the paper. I tried to keep things vaguely realistic by making the folds of the paper go vertical up the petals. Then I mixed some acrylic paint together. You don't need to use any special colours for this - just a decent amount of white, and a small amount of of red and yellow. Although the petals dry lighter, colour (especially red) goes a long way when added to white.

Placing a petal over a jar/unimportant pot/scrap paper, I misted them until they were damp (here you'll learn how thick your paper is, go easy on the water until you've got an understanding of what you're dealing with!). Gently begin adding colour to your petals!

Let them dry and peel them off their surfaces. I've seen some people speed up the process by putting the dish in the microwave for for 15-30 second bursts but as it's a long weekend and sunny(!), I wasn't in a particular rush.

I nipped out into the garden and uh, relieved a hebe bush of a burdensome twig. In future I'll be on the lookout for larger, fallen branches as it will allow for larger flowers. I hot glued the petals together, beginning with a curled petal and working out. The buds were similar only scrunched up smaller.

And here is the finished flower! I'm really happy with this as my first attempt and it's lovely in my flat. Plants (both real and 'fake' like this) are slowly taking over the the flat and I am absolutely okay with it. Perhaps I'll try my hand at another species next time...

https://www.instagram.com/p/BwfFRDupflR/

Since 2015, the Audacious Women Collective has focused on empowering and encouraging women to overcome personal, political and institutional barriers, and to celebrate the achievements of inspirational Scottish women. The Audacious Women Festival happens once a year and a range of workshops and talks are held by and for people who identify as women.

I was lucky enough to get a ticket for a gilding workshop run by Sally-Ann Johns of Studio 58 at the City Art Centre. I had zero experience of gilding prior to this day so I'm very grateful to Sally-Ann for teaching me! Photos courtesy of my Instagram story that day!

We began by coating a wooden board with a gold acrylic paint. This would act as our base and would also help mask any issues we might encounter when we placed the gold down on the board as beginners. Hair dryers were used to speed drying along.

Next up was working out what word we wanted to gild/gild around. After a lot of humming and hawing, I decided to simply do The Travelling Quill initials in a pale blue and gild the background.

Once we were happy with our designs, we needed to coat what we wanted to gild with a substance called gold size. Size is an adhesive that can be used to stick gold leaf or any other kind of 'leaf' to a surface. It's quite runny and we used small paint brushes to apply it to our wood.

Another quick blast with the hair dryer and we were ready to apply our gold leaf! No going back after this as once the gold leaf touches the size, it is sticking! Placing the goldleaf was tricky because of this. It's very delicate and fragile so you have to place it gently and avoid tearing it.

With the entire board covered, the unattached gold leaf then needs to be brushed away. Using incredibly soft brushes, we revealed our designs below. It felt a bit like excavating ancient ruins or fossils!

A quick spray with sealant outside to protect everything...

And then that was that!

Not too bad for a total beginner! I missed a few spots with size but I'm very pleased with how it turned out and the board has pride of place in my office now!

A few years ago now, I was studying New Year's Resolutions. I was in Canada for a semester at the University of Victoria and I had a class called Motivation, Emotion and Wellbeing. In this class, we spent a portion of time examining historic and current research into why people do what they do - and why they don't do what they really should do.

• Why does a student only begin an essay the night before it's due instead of writing it during the week?
• Why does a person recently discharged from hospital not do their physiotherapy, despite knowing its importance? 
• Why do people give up their New Year's Resolutions after a couple of weeks? 

I think understanding the process of decision making has been a huge help in actually achieving goals. Now, a disclaimer. Just because I was a student in that class doesn't mean I'm now cured and have perfect motivation for everything - far from it. But people don't just do things. There are a number of factors at play before a person decides to get up off the sofa to go for a run - too many to go into now  - but my take away from that portion of the class was that New Year's Resolutions are way too specific. 

Uh, yeah, of course you're going to give up on your goal when what you told yourself on the 1st January was "I'm not going to eat any processed sugar at all and I'm going to go to the gym three times a week - no matter what!" No matter what? So nothing can get in the way? What happens when you get that cold that's been going around and you miss an entire week and a friend makes you a carb heavy meal to get your strength back up. Ooops, guess I broke my resolution. Time to give up. 

That kind of statement is extremely harsh and inevitably brings up a load of guilt when you can't fulfil it. So in my research for this class, I came across the idea of assigning a word to the year. Just one word but it needs to encompass what you would like to achieve. For example, when I first read this in 2014, I knew my word for the year was 'travel' as I had visited three continents that year and grown a lot as a person because of it. 2016 was 'career'. My focus was getting my first graduate job but had I not achieved this, my resolution word would have still been kind on myself. If I had got to the end of 2016 and not got that job, I had still progressed my career by graduating from university.

By staying broad, you make things achievable and there's room to breathe when you need a break. I love this as a concept because it ties so nicely in with No More Zero Days - the idea that even a little progress is better than no progress at all, no matter how seemingly insignificant it may be.

So all that was a very roundabout way to announce that my resolution word for 2019 is 'creativity'! I want this year to be the most creative one yet, whatever that may look like. I have a lot of different projects bubbling away and I know that there will be others that will be very spur of the moment too, like this flower pressing frame below (only 85p, thanks IKEA!). I can't wait to see what 2019 brings!

London and I are permanently in a love/hate relationship. 

The more I travel, the more I realise how comfortable I feel in mountainous landscapes. The incredible view below and ones like it relax me like nothing else and are wholeheartedly one of the reasons I chose to go to Stirling for my degree. But London, as I'm sure you've noticed, looks nothing like those rolling hills. London has enough culture, icons and landmarks to rival all of mainland Europe (as well as being the home of my friends and family) but it's also polluted, overpopulated and flat. Very, very flat. Flat is okay for a while but I get a true yearning for hills and mountains after too long.

This trip to the Lake District was slap bang in the middle of my summer break from uni so it has thankfully been able to tide me over until I'm back in bonnie Scotland. I got to see some incredible feats of nature and it didn't rain half as much as we thought it would! To top it all off, this was my first real trip without the input of parents, with just my uni friends. It was great to see everyone again even if it was only for a few days with some people. In this post I'll lay down what I got up to while I was there but save my favourite part of the holiday for the following post.