Business Goal Reflection

Time to Reflect

The business has taken a back seat over the past 18 months as I took time out to work with my local wildlife group which I now run completely. During this time I helped create a hedgehog campaign in our adjoining villages and helped build a social media following which I hope will become an engaging and active community of wildlife lovers. Now the wildlife group is up and running its back to business.

Reflection during the past 18 months has been the most valuable time I have invested in my business so far and gave me space to figure out the direction I wanted to take my business. I started my business in a very dark period, at the onset of Covid restrictions. In some ways, it was good because I moved away from photography and started focusing more on illustration which I'd forgotten how much I loved, but it also created a bubble around my business which was very restrictive and was difficult to escape from. Creating a rewilded garden helped enormously to refocus and feel more open to life again. Creating habitats in our small garden and watching life move in has been so rewarding and took my creativity in a new direction.

Going forward it will be unlikely that I will create any more paper flower templates but will continue to sell the two roses that are on sale on Etsy. Instead, I have plans to make them and sell in box frames as a work of art. Most exciting of all is that I will be studying connections in nature through illustration and would like to create books to share the knowledge I gain. I'll also continue to discuss difficult topics through fine art. Fine art is such a good way to get people to challenge their views and belief systems without verbal confrontation, and instead evoking emotions that can be explored by the viewer in their own time, reaching their own conclusion without judgement.

The rest of the year will be spent learning inking and watercolour techniques, and outlining the books I'd like to write and illustrate to give direction for my nature research and journalling.

The future feels very exciting.