Hail and well met!
Published work. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the artist Padlilly…
Ok, I will stop there (can you guess one of my fandoms?). Welcome to my website and my first ever blog post! It is both terrifying and exciting to be writing this after thinking about it for so long.
So lets get into it
This is me:
I am an artist. I do art. And also crafts (craftist?), but the focus here is the art.
For the vast majority of my life (30/34 years, 88%!) I have never really considered myself an artist. I drew stuff, sure, and painted and inked and sketched and doodled and generally didn’t stop, but I was convinced that I wasn’t creative, and I certainly wasn’t an artist.
But over the last few years, I started to realise that what I considered to be an “Artist” (with a capital A) was some idealised impossible dream. And that actually, I was an artist, and that actually some of my stuff was kinda … good?
(Side note, this journey is a long one, so defo saving that for another blog post.)
Even still, I was terrified to put myself out there. What if I was wrong? What if my art is actually shite and I am fooling myself? So I kept it a hidden little world, showing only a handful of people I knew personally, and occasionally to strangers on insta or reddit.
But, you know, it kind of sucks living like that. And, quite frankly, a bunch of shitty stuff happened in my life, which made me realise that I have to seize opportunities and try things and fight for what I really want and value in life.
And so, here I am! With a website, and an instagram page (@padlillyart), and I even downloaded tiktok (@padlillyart). I am still terrified, but I am going to try my best, put myself out there and see where I go - and I would love to have you come along for the journey.
my art (well some of it)
My art style and interests have meandered wildly over the years. But where I am now is cats. And fandoms. But focusing on the cats. With maybe some dogs thrown in.
Here is some of my art (you can more of it in my Gallery)
Most of them include my wonderful cat, Catherine, but recently I have started including my family’s cats (we are a cat family for sure).
My cat, Catherine
Literally the best thing in the entire world according to my daughter M.
All of the scenes are inspired by fandoms that I love. And thankfully there are a lot of fandoms I love. I am a self proclaimed and proud fangirl. One of my favourite quotes is by John Green on nerds, because it beautifully sums up how I feel:
“Nerds like us are allowed to be unironically enthusiastic about stuff. Nerds are allowed to LOVE stuff, like, jump-up-and-down-in-your-chair-can’t-control-yourself LOVE it. When people call people nerds, mostly what they’re saying is, ‘You like stuff,’ which is not a good insult at all, like, ‘You are too enthusiastic about the miracle of human consciousness”
That’s me, a nerd, unironically enthusiastic about so many different things, and what is more enjoyable to draw than stuff you love?
The style is a combination of a lot of different things, but the key elements are inspired by art deco, with geometric shapes, bold lines and rich colours - the limited colour palette is further based on risograph printing (definitely need a whole other blog post for that). There is also an element of minimalism in how I try and express the elements of the scene with one key focal point, and surrealism in how I utilise elements in the fandom to give clues to the context of the scene.
Although I have used a lot of different mediums in my time, at the moment I am creating digital art - using procreate on my iPad. There are a lot of reasons for this. The main one is that I love creating digital art. But I cannot deny that a big factor is that, being in full time work, a parent, a pet owner and a carer, getting solid amounts of time (and space) to do physical art is just not on the cards at the moment.
Captain’s Log, stardate 78049.6…
So what am I doing with this blog? Essentially I want to bring you along the journey, be it new pieces, exploring products to sell, methods and process, reflecting on the journey to date, or more personal stuff.
My plan is to post every Monday, so please do come back. Please also follow me on Instragram (@padlillyart) and TikTok (@padlillyart)! I will also be sending out a monthly newsletter summarising all the activity of the month, plus some extras - you can sign up here (scroll to the bottom!).
I think that is it for now, so I will sign off and leave you with one last picture of Catherine, because who can resist that fluffy face??
- Padlilly
(and Catherine)
