It is the middle of August, which means that in one month I will be flying out to study abroad in London, England! I have to keep repeating this fact to myself because sometimes I still don’t believe it.

I am starting to get ready to go and I have a long list of things to do before I leave. One of these things is get a blog started. I will continue to write for Where Creativity Works while abroad, but I will also be writing a personal blog for friends and family to follow my adventure. I am really excited to get that going and have been trying to come up with a name for it. (I put a lot of pressure on naming things: it must be perfect!) While brainstorming with some friends, one suggested “Getting Lost in London” I really like this because 1) I have no sense of direction and 2) It’s like I will be swept away by the city. I’m not 100% set on this name yet though because I still would like to include ‘art’ in the name, and this one doesn’t include it.

Recently, I began doing rough sketches for “Getting Lost in London” as I want to have a logo of this at the top of my site. I took photos of my sketchbook after I came up with two ideas that I really liked. For the one, I really like to idea of a castle garden, but it may be a little complex. For the other, I drew calligraphy into arrows, which may be a bit obvious, yet is very clear and strong.

So far, I have brought the arrow design into Adobe Illustrator. I work in a kind of branching method where I’ll take the start of a design from a sketch and then, as I make changes, I duplicate it and make more changes. You can begin to see the directions I take it as little changes are made. I stopped at color for now because I always give myself too many options and then can’t decide! That is my general flow in illustrator; sometimes my workspace gets too full though!