Five Brave Facts Mind Map Illustration. This “Five Brave Facts Mind Map Illustration” is my April Assignment from Lilla Roger’s portfolio bootcamp! To be honest with you, when this mini exercise was revealed I felt a bit overwhelmed because for this mini exercise we have to write down five brave things we have done in our life, draw some symbols to represent these five brave fact and illustrate our first initial letter. For the initial letter illustration you can have a look my the other blog post “Spring Floral Personalised Initial Letter“.

There are so many brave ladies in this bootcamp who have shared so many amazing stories. Some of the stories will shock you and some of the stories will make you cry. I remember when I read some of the stories I couldn’t believe how one person could survive all of her ordeals and I really admire their courage to share their past and their brave things and experiences.

Unfortunately I wasn’t brave enough to tell people my dark secrets and past so I decided to keep things “positive” and I’ve found five brave facts from my life which have a position meaning. These things were moving to the UK, abseiling from the top of St John’s Church here in Edinburgh, getting married, becoming a mother and changing career.

Another challenge for me from this assignment is I had to crate a lot of hand-lettering for myself. I started hand-lettering recently because of Lilla Roger’s bootcamp assignment and I’ve mentioned a few times about this. I was quite afraid of hand-lettering because my hand-lettering has never been that beautiful or pretty. When I was in School we had to do Chinese calligraphy and I remember my teacher always said my Chinese calligraphy looks like poo, so I’ve been afraid of writing in front of people since then.

But during Lilla Roger’s class she kept encouraging us to do hand-lettering. She told us to “paint” letters and if you know hand-lettering this can really help your illustration career. That’s why I started forcing myself to practice and to “try” it. i really enjoyed the hand-lettering assignment and I may be a “hand-lettering newbie” I was pretty happy with the results. I’ve also looked into extra online courses for hand-lettering for which I may sign up and see if I can continue to improve my hand-lettering and to see if I can get some feedback.

One of the interesting feedbacks I got from people when the saw my mind map illustration is “Why do the plants have names?”. The reason I gave my plants names is because the big thing in my life right now personally is gardening. We moved to a posh area of Edinburgh in December (for my daughter’s school) and this is the first time I have had a flat with a nice front and back garden. I’ve always wanted to grow my own herbs, edible flowers and vegetables so living in my current flat is like my dream come true.

I started saving the seeds from the fruits and vegetables we ate at home and I’m now growing plants from the seeds. I’m finding this is more economical than buying seeds from a garden store and so far I’m growing strawberries, butternut squash, chilli, pepper, watermelon, pomegranate, loquat and avocado. Butternut squash is growing especially well and I’ve bought seeds for broccoli, courgette, radish and pumpkin because it’s almost impossible for me to have seeds from these vegetables.

Now I’m growing these plants I’ve become really attached to them. A local stray cat has pretty much adopted us and I was originally going to write these plants are like my pets but they almost feel like it. That’s why I gave the plants in my illustrations names. In reality I haven’t named them because, well, they’re plants, and there’s a lot of them(!) but hopefully in a couple months time I can show you my freshly decorated garden and also the vegetable patch we’re creating right now. Stay tuned!