Back to school

a slow motion drawing exercise

Instead of our usual stream of conscious journey through articles and poems, this week my thoughts will be expressed through dance drawings.

Last week I mentioned transitional weather fashion (I love you Autumn), and this naturally progressed into thoughts of back to school campaigns. Afterskool did a great deep dive on back to school fashion, and so I began my drawing thread with an elephant sporting a gap hoodie, athleisure, ballet flats and the quiet confidence that they are very on trend:

The gap hoodie comeback tour led me to reminisce about the ever coveted dELiA*s catalogue and so I drew outfits from one of their fall campaigns circa 1996:

Growing up in the UK, our back to school campaigns were mostly for clarks, pods or kickers shoes, as everything from the ankle up was school uniform. I spent many hours fantasizing about what I would wear on my first day back at school were I not already sworn to a green pleated skirt (pleated skirts are now on trend), and so next up, I designed my dream back to school outfit and entrance:

I then checked the time and realized I had therapy in ten minutes and I didn’t want to go (sweater inspired by dELiA*s).

You can buy this sweatshirt for a limited time here.

Whence I returned from therapy, I gazed upon the basketball I drew but 55 minutes earlier and remembered that my friend once told me their first word was basketball.

I love basketball (I can only shoot hoops), and I also love ballet (I can only do nothing), and I am very excited that balletcore is in style as I spent a large portion of 2021 dressed in a ballet outfit I bought from capezio to wear while watching Bunheads:

Inspired by the soft pastel colours of ballet, I then drew a bear getting some twilight rest:

As I went to pack up my soft pastel copic markets, I noticed that they were lying down in the order of a rainbow, so you better believe I drew them. As I created my masterpiece, I got increasingly bored of drawing the same pen again and again and made peace with the fact that while I liked how the pens looked on the table, I had not business trying to recreate them myself:

Not wanting to end our first month together reminiscing about two out of three subjects we’ve already discussed (twilight rest and boredom) I instead cast my mind to soft pastel rainbows, and one of my favourite facts about them:

Rainbows are rarely seen at noon.

This sounded like a classic spy phrase, and then I found out there is an app for that. My randomly selected spy phrase was “Fifty red balloons have played the piano.”

and then I realized I should have used the spy generator for all my drawings this week.

Please feel free to write your own spy phrase in the comments.

And so, in conclusion:

Congratulations on our first month-iversary together, i’m having a great time over here.

To my slow motion multi-tasking subscribers:

I’m slowly introducing a paid subscription model. If you like slow motion multi-taking and are able to pay $5 a month towards supporting it, it would mean the world to me. I am enjoying making these so much and would love to be able to continue to dedicate time to them and release them on a weekly basis, and a paid subscription model would be hugely helpful in allowing me to do so.

From October 1st I will be offering 4 posts a month for paid subscribers and 2 posts every other week for free subscribers. Thank you so much, your support so far has been so wonderful. To upgrade your subscription plan please click the link below: