I spent 5 years in education as a multi-media artist from 1997-2002, but after graduating from university had to take a full time job to support my 3 children. My career in full-time producing didn’t allow me the time to return to working as an artist for many years. By the time I had the opportunity to focus on myself, my skills were woefully out of date.

In 2015 I decided to retrain in design &video - self taught. I focused on work related skills mainly, and held back from allowing myself in retraining in my true passion - motion design. There were several reasons for this - time, cost, fear & pain. But the main reason was FEAR. I had started to learn to draw for only a few weeks at the beginning of my visual training, a change in college, and it was no longer available, so I stopped. I was one of those kids, one of those adults who was led to believe that I couldn’t draw, ergo, I would never be able to animate. I created a ceiling for myself and stayed under it. Without being able to draw, visualise, or create vector shapes, motion graphics would be a limited road for me. 

At the beginning of this process, I had decided to work with an illustrator, but I was finding creating a brief frustrating, what I really needed were lots of options that I could easily adapt myself: I needed to draw. Not only that but I needed to use the dreaded Illustrator. I put the project on hold and signed up for School of Motion’s Photoshop & Illustrator Unleashed Course. It was so worth it. I learnt the basics of Illustrator, and more advanced Photoshop but also how to plan creating illustrations for motion, which is very different.

I had an amazing audio producer, Nicole Raymond for this project but I also decided to learn Logic Pro so I could also compose and produce music & audio for the soundscapes which would give me more control over the results. That is an ongoing process, and really challenging but enjoyable.