3 years ago today, on the 29 March 2008, I set up this blog and posted my
first entry...
HAPPY BIRTHDAY BLOG!
It's strange to think back to that time. I had been working for nearly four years as an in-house book designer at a publishers near London Bridge, and while the job was okay, I felt like it wasn't what I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life. I had the idea of applying to go and do an MA in Illustration and get back to my drawing, but at the time that seemed like a massive change, so to sort of test the waters, I enrolled on a short course at Camberwell College of Arts to get a feel for being back in a teaching environment...
I was a bit nervous before I started, and thought that maybe everyone else on the course would be a lot younger than me, but after the first day all those worries had gone. Quite a few people on the course were around the same age as me, and had come along for the exact same reasons as I had. At the end of the first day, I knew that this was something that I wanted to do, and sent off my application for the MA course that same week.
When I went back to work the following week, a lot of people wanted to know what I'd been up to on the course, so I set up this blog as a way to share what I'd done. I got accepted onto the MA course at Camberwell (as did one of my friends from the short course!), and left my job in August to enroll full-time in September.
Now here we are 3 years later. I completed my MA course in 2009, set up my own website –
paulshinndraws.com – and have made over 300 posts on this blog. I am enjoying doing illustration work and hope to get a lot more commissions this year. It's amazing the difference a few years can make...
Here's to the next 3 years!
