Welcome to My Favourite Place
This is where the doors to the garden open, the music goes on, and the making happens – not always by myself, sometimes with my friends, my family, round a table, learning to be free in our creativity.
This is where the doors to the garden open, the music goes on, and the making happens – not always by myself, sometimes with my friends, my family, round a table, learning to be free in our creativity.
The Clear Vision vs. The Messy Experiment
My creativity flows in two very different ways, but they both come from the exact same place of openness.
Sometimes, I walk into the studio with a crystal-clear image already fully formed in my head. I know exactly what I want to create, what the colours should look like, and how it needs to feel. On those days, it can take a bit of patience to trust the process and make space for that specific image to come to life.
But just as often, I work by simply playing. I’ll come in with no plan at all, spread materials across the table, and just experiment. I’ll mess around with strokes, mix paint colours, brush layers on paper, and see what happens. There’s so much fun and pure joy in just seeing how different things work together without worrying about making a “perfect” piece of art
It’s Not All Blue… The Diverse Mediums
Because I guide my work entirely by intuition, I don’t tie myself down to just one tool. While the darkroom is a huge part of my life, it isn’t the only thing that happens in here.
On any given day, you might find me working on:
Alternative Printmaking: Getting my hands dirty with printing inks, tetra packs, and digital printing.
Gouache Paintings: I started with gouache a couple of years ago and just love it, the strong pigments make it so beautiful to play with.
Sketching: I often use a photograph I’ve taken as a starting point, and draw from there, I’m usually trying to capture a feeling rather than just a place – the people are so important.
Different Gears, Same Intuitive Place
Because I create through experimentation and gut feeling, my work can look quite different from one month to the next. For a long time, I used to wonder how it all fit together.
But over time, I’ve realized that what ties every single piece together is the slow, deliberate pace and the sheer joy of the trial-and-error process. I often don’t even see the common thread in my own work until I stop, look back over months or even years of making, and realise that my intuition was guiding me along the same path the entire time.
Everything you see in the shop or in our DIY kits comes directly out of this space, these experiments, and these moments of play. Thanks for stepping inside and being a part of it.
— Karen
