BLOGANUARY 2025 DAY 14
Yesterday I woke up feeling motivated and energised, and had a productive day sending out emails and doing adminny things. I felt quite buzzy by the evening so did a small collage, based on something that had flitted across my consciousness, to do with planetary alignments. I have a circle-cutter tool, and it was fun to find shapes in my Condé Nast Traveller supplement to use as celestial bodies. The Space Shuttle is from my collage resources book:
I didn’t sleep well last night, and woke up this morning feeling resentful and defeated, for no apparent reason. I attempted some potential-stockist emails, once again realised I don’t like or understand LinkedIn, and decided to call it a day at mid-afternoon, feeling thankful that I’m at an age and stage where a well-timed pot of tea and some toast can go a long way to restoring my spirits. I had some good responses to my emails (including one new and two potential stockists) but I still felt disenchanted with everything, so thought I would retreat to my sketchbook. One of the handful of podcasts I had listened to during my wakefulness was an In Defense of Plants episode all about cashews, and although I vaguely knew that these nuts grew out of the base of a fleshy fruit type thing, I couldn’t remember ever actually looking it up. A few taps of the keyboard later, and there was a gallery of cashew “apples” with the little nuts hanging below. In their raw state, the nuts are contained in a shell which has a liquid that can cause blistering and dermatitis. It’s sufficiently potent that there is an industrial use for this cashew-nut shell liquid (CNSL). The cashew-apples are a nutritious food but are only eaten locally. Perhaps, like mulberries, they don’t transport or store well, hence why we here in the UK only know about the nuts. The trees are native to Brazil, but are also grown commercially in warm climates such as Sri Lanka, Portugal and Malaysia.
Anyway, I was intrigued, so decided to memorialise my useless facts in gouache:
