Hello, I'm Bonny Snowdon, ex-corporate person and mother turned successful artist entrepreneur. It wasn't that long ago though that I lacked the confidence, vision, and support network to focus on growing my dream business. Fast forward past many life curve balls, waves of self-doubt, and so many lessons learned. And you'll see Ignite my thriving online coloured pencil artist community, a community that changes members' lives for the better,
and gives me freedom to live abundantly whilst doing what I love and spending quality time with my beloved family and dogs, all whilst creating my best artwork with coloured pencils and mentoring others to do the same. But this life wasn't always how it was for me. It used to only exist in my imagination. I've created the, It's A Bonny Old Life podcast to help increase people's confidence,
share mine and my community's experience, and hope through fascinating personal stories, champion the other amazing humans in my personal, professional, and membership community, and create another channel through which I can support others to realize their dreams. If you're a passionate coloured pencil artist or an aspiring one who's looking to create their best work and a joyful life you love, you are in the right place. Grab a cuppa and a custard cream. Let's get cracking.
My goodness, it is the end of July. This month, saw my 53rd birthday, my biggest tutorial yet being finished, edited and uploaded to the Ignite membership, another free tutorial, some grooming mishaps with the dogs as the Yorkshire hedge rows burst into bloom with those little tiny green burrs that get everywhere.
It's also seen me starting my adventure in the garden, learning how to care for different plants, and working on a huge project that will be announced in August. I'm so proud of my podcast and love chatting to people. However, due to a really busy couple of months, the episodes will reduce to once a month just for the summer. So don't worry,
we'll be back to once a week later in the year. So sit back with your cup of tea and your biscuit of choice and enjoy.
Gosh, I, I, I think I start every single Roundup video with, oh my goodness, another month has gone and another month has gone. I can't believe July is nearly at an end. August is nearly here,
and gosh, trying to rack my brains as to what I've done in July. And actually we've done quite a lot. Finished, finished my, my big tutorial. I'm gonna show you the, the pictures in a minute. We've started a new Art Club piece. I'm about to start another art club piece next, next week, and done a, a new free tutorial,
which is amazing. I'm gonna show you that as well. And yeah, it's just been a, it's been a whirlwind month. Again, I, I can't believe, I can't believe where the time is going. I really, really can't believe where the time is going. It's, it's crazy. I just need to check my, oh yeah, it's,
I've got little, so I have a, a poncho for buying microphones. I have, I want to say literally hundreds of microphones. I don't have hundreds of microphones. I probably have about seven and probably none of them work particularly well. And it's user error rather than something wrong with a microphone. I've got a little one, a little lapel one on at the minute,
and, and it keeps on, it's supposed to work with Bluetooth and it keeps on kind of cutting out. So I keep on having to check it. I bought a microphone this month and I'm, I'm, I'm, I do this all the time. I see stuff on Facebook and somebody is like, oh, this is a really great piece of equipment.
I'm like, right, getting it. Off I go onto Amazon, you know, road, pod, mic, get it. It comes, it is literally just the microphone. There's no, there's nothing to plug into it. There's no nothing. I'm like, right, I need a stand and I need something to plug into it. Little do I know that the,
the, the you, it doesn't just plug into your computer, this particular mic, you have to plug it into those. One of, one of those fancy boxes things. So technical, so is just looking particularly sort of, I don't know, pretty, and like I know what, I'm professional looking on my desk, but it doesn't actually work because I don't have one of these fancy box things.
So that's the next thing that I need to look into. One of the fancy box things. So I've got little microphone now that I know he is working, which is great. Sound is a really important thing when it comes to recording, and it's one of the things that I struggle with the most. I have to say, you know, I'm not somebody who's particularly technically minded and I don't really understand the whys and where falls and everything,
but it is, if you don't get your sound right, it, it can be really, really annoying. And the the problem is when the sound isn't right, not understanding why it's not right is incredibly frustrating. Particularly for somebody like me who, you know, is just, this is all completely self-taught. Everything that I do, video editing, you know,
taking videos of myself, taking videos of, of my drawings, it is all completely self-taught. It's just get the equipment and try and learn how to use it. I'm saying self-taught, obviously. I go onto YouTube and I look up videos of people who are far more proficient than I am and learn how to use it. But, you know, I've now got this amazing teleprompter.
I'm not using it now. And it's fantastic. It's absolutely fantastic. It, it's, it's brilliant because it means that I can write all my script out and then I can, I can put my, my phone, I'm just trying to, oh, it's here. Look, let me see if I can show you what it looks like. So this is,
this is one of them here where is is on is on mirror mode. So you can't, you can't actually read the words, but basically I put it in front of my teleprompter. My teleprompter has got a, a mirror so that I, so it mirrors my wording. So it comes the right side, the, the right way round for me.
And I just press the screen and it just goes, and it starts moving nice and slowly so that I can actually read my script whilst I'm looking at the camera. It's something I need to practice, because I did some videos, I did some videos, I wrote the script. I was really happy with them, did the videos, gave them to Lucy and she's,
she just said to me this morning, Bonny, those videos that you did, please can you redo them? But can you smile? I don't, I'm quite a smiley person. But when you are reading something and you are trying to record it and you're trying to make sure that your eyes are looking at the camera at the same time, you become quite like this and you become a little bit robotic.
Anyway, so I've redone, redone them and, and hopefully she'll be happy with them. So what else happened? Oh gosh. So I still can't quite tell you what's going on yet, but beginning of August, hopefully we will be announcing this new venture that I'm going into, which I am very, very excited about. We've kind of got things secured,
just looking at contracts at the minute, trying to find things like photographers and all of that kind of stuff. But it's, it's definitely going ahead, which I'm really excited about. So we're gonna know more about that in, in August. There's, there's something else that I'm working on in August as well. Again, I'm really excited. It's been in my head for quite a long time.
Probably about three years, four years is finally coming to fruition, so I'm gonna be working on that in in August. And I've got another project as well, again, I've been thinking about for quite a long time. Again, I've been setting some time aside to start kind of preparing for that and, and putting that all together again. Very, very exciting.
So, lots of, lots of things coming, lots of things coming. Obviously my tutorials, I've done what we've done this month. We've had, I've created the little, the little butterfly, which has been, which is A three B, which is really nice to do. It's more of a, it's more of a mindful coloring than a, you know,
an actual tutorial on how to layer and everything. I, I honestly think sometimes we just need to go back to the motion of, of coloring rather than getting bogged down with, oh, is this perfect? And is that perfect? So I've done this this month. I can't remember whether I showed you this one. This is what we did in Art Club.
So we did the zebras in in Art Club. That was another really, really super, super piece. And this, again, this kind of prompted me to do the butterfly because it was more colouring rather than, than layering. Obviously there's, you know, the skill and technical details and everything in there, but it was more about kind of filling shapes in.
That was a really lovely one to do. This one we're on with in Art Club at the moment. Now I didn't think I was gonna enjoy this. I have to say I chose it because it was like, that's different. That's gonna give us some different skills. But it will also help with drawing animals and, and drawing portraits. Actually, you can see I've put all my little colours down on the bottom there,
just 'cause I don't really use reds very often, but I think this has come out quite nicely, I have to say. And one of the things that it reminds me of, and it's definitely showing my age, I dunno whether you remember back in sort of like the eighties and nineties, the Athena posters. That, and, and that, this kind of reminds me of that,
you know, sort of like the champagne and all of that kind of stuff really, really reminds me of this. And I, I happened to find some of my old school drawings and yeah, it's quite, it's quite amazing actually. I've got one of a, of a champagne bottle and it's all in like bright colors. It's all painted. So I'm gonna share those at some point as well,
because I think it's quite interesting to look back. It was 19 84, 19, well, between 84 and 86. So when I was 14, between 14 and 16, I've got quite a few sort of like drawings and everything that I found, which is quite interesting. So I'm gonna share those at, at some point. And then the, the, the biggest thing is this one that I finished,
this is my Girl in the Daffodils. I happen to call her something else this morning because I've spent all weekend editing the videos. She wasn't just the girl in the daffodils, she was the girl in the something daffodils. I'm sure you can actually, you can find a word that'll fit in there. When you are editing videos, oh my goodness, it takes forever.
So this is a 40 hours, 40 hours drawing. So it's taken me 40 hours to do this. There are 20 parts to the video, and each video is I guess around two hours long. Some of them are slightly less, some of them are slightly more, there's a couple that are about three hours. When I put the videos together, I,
I record onto SD card so I don't record directly to my computer because sometimes you can get a bit of a lag or something can kind of go wrong. It still can go wrong on an SD card as well. But I, I tend to record directly onto an SD card. I then know when that SD card is full, take it out, put another one in,
and then off I go. So I have to copy everything from the SD card when I record. And this is a really, really good tip actually for anybody recording art tutorials like this, because you have to edit it, obviously at the end, if you've just got one massive great big, you know, long piece of film and you go through and edit all of the sounds and stuff like that that you don't want,
it can take, it can really take forever and it does take forever anyway. So what I do with the SD cards is I'll sit there, I'll be recording if somebody comes in or if there's a loud noise outside or if one of the dogs bark, I stop my recording and then when the sound's gone, I start the recording. So then I have lots and lots of little clips and I put all of those clips together and then I edit them into one sort of,
like one and a half hour part. I then have to go through and find all of the pencils that I've used, because inevitably I've been doing this over probably three or four weeks and I've been doing other stuff as well. So my pencil pots have changed and I'm a, I'm a terror for not preparing and not getting stuff right and all of that kind of stuff.
Just check my microphone's working still. So I had to go through all of the clips just to make sure that I got all the pencils and everything in so I don't have to listen to them all. But I can just sort of kind of move my, my cursor through and then it sort of zips through as if it's in time lapse. And I can see when I'm picking up a different pencil or I can see the colour and I go,
right, that's this colour, that's that colour. I did use a lot of colours. I did use a lot of colours. So many colours. And could I have done it in far fewer colours? Yes, probably. Would it have been a as fun? No, probably not. Trying to mix colours rather than just use what I've got in front of me.
So, and I, I did use quite a few of the Lightfast colours as well in this particular piece, which was really nice, Heather and the wild lavender I used, which is great. One of the biggest things, I'll just pick this up again, one of the biggest lessons that I'm gonna do a YouTube tutorial on this because I think it's really important.
I don't know if anybody, I'm sure you all do, subscribe to Ann Kohlberg's Color magazine, fantastic magazine. This this month's July, and did a feature on why she does. So. She's a portrait artist, brilliant color pencil artist in America. Why she leaves faces till the end. And it's such a great article and I want to do a YouTube video,
not around her article, but around what she's talking about. When you are drawing skin, you never draw this. Well, I'm saying you never, of course people who are very proficient at drawing skin do, but people like me who are still very much in that learning phrase, getting the values right of the skin is really, really hard if you just go straight in with the skin.
And what Anne says is she leaves her her faces till the end, a because she loves drawing faces. And that's like the icing on top of the cake, the cherry on top of the icing on top of the cake. And B, because you've got all of the context around the face, you've got the hair, any background, so you've got all of your values around it so that then when you come and do your values in the face,
you can go dark enough. And this is one of the things that I really, really found when I was drawing this piece. I drew this little hand here, this little hand here, holding the daffodil. I drew that in isolation. So there was no background behind it, there was no daffodil there or anything like that. I just drew the little hand and my daughter walked in.
She went, oh, she looks like she's gone a bit crazy with the fake tan there mum, because her little hand looked really, really, really dark. But then you put the context around it and it makes sense. And this is very, very similar to when you are drawing white animals on white paper. We, we go in with the values that are correct and they look too dark.
So we, and the problem is when we see, when you, when you see fair skin, when you see my hand here, you think, oh, you know, Caucasian, fair skin, you know, pinky sort of, you know, peachy colours. No, not at all. I mean, this little girl's face here So much orange,
you know, one of the orange and walnut brown. We, our brains don't comprehend how dark white is and how dark like pale skin. They, we just don't comprehend. It's really weird. Who was I talking to? Antonia Antonio Preston, the fantastic Australian art, honestly, so privileged to speak to her. And she was saying the same thing,
you know, we don't comprehend how, how dark, you know, pale skin is and, and, and with white animals. So that's something that I want to do a little bit of a YouTube tutorial on because I, it really brought it home to me when I just saw that little hand in isolation. I was like, oh my goodness, she really,
she doesn't look like, like her hand's, right? It looks really dark, but bring everything round it. And it worked beautifully. So that, again, that is something that I talk to my students about all of the time is values, values over everything else, you know, detail, colour, all of that. Your values are so, so,
so important. So I'm gonna be having a bit of a a think about that. And then I'm just trying to think about what else we've got. Oh, very excitingly. I've bought a pair of Secateurs. My, my TikTok is, I love TikTok and it's normally full of dogs, cats, horses, doing stuff. And at the moment my TikTok is full of gardening tips and I have three really quite large clumps of lavender in my garden.
I've had loads of bees. Loads of bees, and I've bought, I've got, my mum bought me for my birthday, like a little bee drinking thing. So that sits in and it catches the rain and then the bees can have a drink and they're all kind of starting to go off. So you've had those gorgeous purple flowers and now they're all kind of going to seed a little bit.
And I was like, oh, I don't really know what to do. Anyway, so it found this fabulous gardening tip thing on TikTok and bought some secretaries. And I'm now going to prune my lavender, which I'm really excited about because I want to, I want to love gardening, I want to spend time in my garden and I want to understand stuff.
And I'm thinking, well, if I can understand a plant at a time, rather than just going, right, let's have a look at the whole spectrum of flowers that are in my garden and learn about 'em all at the same time. I'm thinking, what if I learn about the lavender first? How do, how do I do that? And then I learn about this plant and then I learn about that plant,
then I'm gonna start to kind of fill my, my, my bank of flower stuff and I'm gonna be able to remember it and then it's going to be a little bit more enjoyable. And I was thinking I'd really like to grow some lettuce and maybe some vegetables and stuff like that. So my thinking is I'm gonna put like a little greenhouse seed thing.
I'll have to have a look on Pinterest or wherever on the side of the, the on side of the garden office. I'm thinking, you know, I could actually have something with a lid that comes up and I can grow stuff because my dogs eat well. I'm really careful about making sure all the flowers in my garden are dog friendly. And with them being dog friendly,
they're really dog friendly. So the dogs eat them like all, there's a couple of plant, I dunno what they are, but they absolutely love them. And these poor plants, they've got no leaves on them. They're just these tweaky twiggy bits. And every time a leaf grows, one of the dogs is like, right, we're having that. So I'm,
I'm very careful about the, the plants that I've got. But the, yeah, the dogs love them and it's a pain. And then they go jumping around in the flower beds screaming out of the back door, get out of my garden. Oh, terrible, terrible animals. They are, aren't you? You are all terrible. They're all lying around me at my feet.
I've got Vinnie here. He's going for his groom on Wednesday. Oh my goodness. We had a real grooming nightmare two days ago. The British countryside is amazing this time of year we've had all of that gorgeous hot weather and then we've had all of the rain. So our hedgerows here in Yorkshire have just gone and they look amazing. They look absolutely beautiful and they love it every time I kind of,
you know, go out driving and, and they, oh, they're amazing, but the burrs are crazy. And my dogs all jumped in a bush, a burr bush. I dunno where the burrs come from, but they jumped in this bush and they were covered from head to toe with burrs. And I kind of was like, I, I'm not really sure,
was it fr, I can't remember which day it was. Was it Friday? I think Saturday, Friday I think it was. I'm like, I don't really know what to do with, with with you all because you're so covered in burrs. So I spent two hours grooming Nelly. I had three different brushes. We ended, I ended up having to pick them off by hand on her,
on her feet in between her toes. Dora wasn't too bad. Vinnie had them all over his bottom, so the whole of his bottom was green. So I was kind of brushing those out. They've still got them in their fur now. They're, they're, you know, they're an awful lot better, but I'm still kind of picking them out. The floor was completely covered in burrs and I had a whole handful,
literally a whole pile of burrs that I got off them. Oh, it's like, oh my goodness, this is just crazy. And of course you can't leave them because they're, they're uncomfortable and then they get in their toes and all of that kind of stuff. So that was really fun with all of this beautiful rainy weather. in fact, it's not raining today.
So I can get out with my secateurs to and do my lavender. That's what I'll do this afternoon. Very excited about that. I've got another scholarship box that's going to somebody who's being supported by IDAS. So that's really, really fabulous. And you know, I'm really happy that I'm doing that, which is, which is wonderful. I'm trying to think what else I've done this month.
Just kind of planning stuff, you know, doing things like emails and the marketing side of things. And an awful lot of the stuff has been around the, this, this event, this new venture that I'm doing later on in this year. Just trying to get that. So it's actually done. It's booked. We can go ahead, you know,
and there's been all sorts of stuff around that. You know, putting a new logo together, looking at sort of stuff. Well I won't go into it 'cause I don't want to give too much away, but, you know, venues was a, a massive thing, you know, trying to find a venue, trying to find a date that would correspond then with being able to market it.
So yeah, it's, there's a, there's a lot of, and I'm saying we, it, I kind of come up with the ideas and then my amazing team who are so organized and so brilliant, they kind of put it together. That's what's brilliant about working with the team. I have to say, you know, who else was I talking about when we were talking about getting help?
'cause that's something I've always, always done is ask for help, always. You know, if I'm not good at something, then I'll, I will. It sounds like I just pass it off to somebody else, but I'll ask for help from somebody who is good at that. And that's really, really helped me. And I think that's definitely one of the reasons why,
you know, I've got to sort of like the place where I am now. So that's kind of it really. I'm working on a black Labrador at the moment. It's really nice actually. It's not particularly a lovely photograph, it's a secret commission. I've got some really lovely commissions coming up. And also end of July, my email goes out to everybody on my commission wait list for portraits for 2024, 2025.
So I'm hoping that that, that we'll get all of that sorted and then, you know, be booked up for the next couple of years, which would be great. I'm taking on fewer portraits just so I can find time to do my own. I've got some images and I want to start working with a photographer as well to get my own images made or made.
I, I, I've got some ideas for images that I've, I'd quite like to get a photographer to work with, a photographer to kind of create, 'cause I wanna draw my own, I wanna do my own pieces. And I'm very much interested in drawing more humans. I won't take commissions on for, for humans, that's far too much stress.
Far too much stress. You know, I I I want to draw humans that I don't know. And then it doesn't matter so much if you, you know, if somebody doesn't recognize them. That's one of the biggest things about drawing human portraits. You have to get that sparkle in the eye. You have to get the personality coming out. And I can do that with the animals,
but I'm not sure I could do that with the humans, but I probably could. I dunno. But I'm really enjoying drawing humans. This little girl here, this the little girl in the, in the, in the beep daffodils. This is, this was, I think gave me the most joy. Well, until I got to this bit here.
Oops. I smudge it all this bit here. This didn't give me particular joy, but the, the, you know, the, the, the, the jeans and ugh, honestly in my absolute element. And, and people look at it and go, oh my goodness, it's so detailed. It's so, you know, it's so, so detailed.
So I'm so realistic. And I'm like, yeah, but, but it's not, it's not hard. And I don't wanna sound flippant when I say it's not hard. It, the techniques that I use, they're just using your pencils and using your tools like a erasers and stuff like that. Maybe a small brush or a cotton bud or whatever. And,
and you're just, you're just kind of creating the illusion of the detail and you're not drawing every single tiny detail. I can't do that. It's why I struggled with the grass. I can't draw every single tiny detail. I, I I create an illusion of, I create the quality of whatever it is that we're drawing. And that's what makes it accessible for anybody to do.
Because it's a process. Yeah, there's a little bit of a spark of something or whatever. You know, I'm, I'm, I am, I would say textures are my thing. I love drawing textures. And I would say that colour picking as well, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm pretty good at that. But the rest of it is just about understanding how your equipment works,
understanding how your tools work, understanding how they work together to then get the texture that you want, which of course comes with experience and experimenting and all of that kind of stuff. But it's not, it's not something that's so far removed from other people wanting to be able to do it. And that's why I've loved every minute of this also that it's a complete tutorial.
So this is step by step recorded as I've drawn it, as I've been drawing it, me speaking as I'm drawing it, you get to hear me go, oh, that hasn't worked properly. Or Oh gosh, I had a bit of a, I had a bit of a sticking point here in the, in the little knee area here. And it wasn't looking like a knee,
it was looking like a thigh and the crease wasn't quite right. And I was like, right, we're gonna come back to that. I'm gonna put a bit more context in, we're gonna come back. 'cause my brain needs to see the whole thing as a knee rather than a thigh. And as soon as I put the context in and I've gone back to that little sort of creasey bit,
my brain kind of clicked in and went, ah, know what we're doing now? Yeah, that's gonna work. We're gonna do this, that and the other. You get to see all of that in my tutorials every time I go wrong. How we get it to go right. Every time I pick a colour and I'm like, hmm, yeah,
no, I'm not sure about this colour. So you are getting to learn all of this stuff. And I do it all live as I'm drawing, which is exhausting for me because I love drawing and I love listening to, as everybody knows Harry Potter, when I draw, it's the only thing I listen to. Harry Potter on loop just ran around the books by,
not by, but written, read by. I can't even remember his name now. He's my favorite person on the, my, my, my brain has gone. My brain has gone. Anyway. So yeah, the Harry Potter books on Loop and that, that's my absolute joy. So when I'm recording, it's harder for me because obviously I'm talking and I don't get to sort of like get into the,
the zone or anything. So, you know, that was 40 hours of talking almost every single day. I was doing a couple of hours a day and you know, you get everything from me, everything, you know, there's no secrets, there's no I'm gonna keep this back or I'll just sort of skimm over that bit. You get absolutely everything.
And I think that's, I think you, you get that with the majority of people who teach. To be honest, it's a very, very generous world is the world of, of teaching art. I think, you know, genuinely people want to share their knowledge and their skills. So yeah. So that's kind of been my, my July, I'm off out tonight with my sisters and my cousins going to the Giggling Squid in Harrogate,
which I'm very excited about. My son thought it was a comedy club. When are you going to that comedy club? And I was like, what? I said, no, no, I'm going to the Giggling Squid. It's a restaurant. It's a Thai restaurant. That's where I'm going tonight. Tickets are all bought. Hotels all booked for October for Nashville,
which I'm very excited about. Still gotta work out how I'm gonna meet all of the guys in America who want to come and say hello. 'cause there's quite a lot of you. I'm not sure where we're gonna do it, but we're still working on that. And yeah, that's about it from me. So be expecting some, some lovely pieces. We're about to start a kingfisher next week in Art Club.
I've got a fabulous tutorial coming up. in fact, I've got two, a smaller one and then a really big one. I've got some beautiful photos from a photographer, which I'm, I am excited about. We're gonna be working on that, which is really good. And yeah, so that's kind of me. Have a lovely, well, I hope you've had a lovely July.
Have a lovely rest of it. However, long's left and gosh into August. Oh my goodness. Can't believe it. So I'll see you all soon.
I really hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of my It's A Bonny Old Life podcast. If you did, I'd be so grateful to you for emailing me or texting a link to the show or sharing it on social media with those you know who might like it too.
My mission with this podcast is all about sharing mine and my community's experience and hope by telling your fascinating personal stories, championing the other amazing humans in my personal, professional, and membership community. And to create another channel through which I can support you to realize your coloured pencil and life dreams. If you haven't done so yet, please help me on my mission to spread positivity and joy throughout the Coloured Pencil world by following me on my socials at Bonny Snowdon Academy or by getting on my list at bonnysnowdonacademy.com.
And remember, I truly believe if I can live the life of my dreams doing what I love, then you can too. We just need to keep championing and supporting each other along the way in order to make it happen. Till next time,
