8th May 2026. Tried out an idea yesterday involving drawing pins, rafia ribbon, and a string of lights where the lights are working pegs. The plan now is to wrap the lights round the luminous green rope for better support. Passed the Boss’s inspection today (aesthetics and mitigations against unexpected gravitational events), so now it’s all systems go for fixing rafia onto the backs of the paintings by hammering drawing pins into them. May contain expletives. Canvases are very light.

6th May 2026. Yesterday, I was mostly making bird silhouettes and cutting them out for my paper bird ‘aviary’. They’re all painted black on one side for dramatic effect, but I’m considering a brighter colour for the other side so children have a choice. I believe pink is rather popular.

5th May 2026. Made a quick AR layer for the painting below. Fire up your Artivive app and point it at the photo for May 3rd.

May the Fourth be with you. It had to be said.

3rd May 2026. The last few days have been taken up with curating, known in the writing world as murdering your darlings. This is where you go through your work ruthlessly assembling candidates for whatever the event is. In this case, there are essentially three: the first comprising a dedicated webpost describing the in-person exhibition and marking the end of the course (July 3rd), the second a digital show to support that and to entertain co-travellers on the OCA trail at a talk in June, and the last to actually submit for a final assessment at the beginning of September. Many of my darlings are refusing to go quietly and today, due to my elderly cat taking umbrage at something unknown and squirting wee at the first available vertical surface, I found a quantity of them in a portfolio I somehow hadn’t checked out. Rabbit hole.

I had some ideas about the exhibition at the cafe which seem to have gone down well and involve varnishing the pieces to be shown so that children can stick silhouettes of birds and frogs on them without causing damage in either direction. Stay with me here. Birds are a bit of a theme for me, and frogs certainly have been (see Frog Fall). Accessibility, inclusivity, getting kids on board early by letting them stamp their own mark on a painting with a bird or two and getting a photo. So now there’s a bird silhouette production line on the flat easel.

The secret’s out now; Facebook general, Facebook local, and Instagram wherever, are all carrying the message.

27th April 2026. Moving from one extreme to another, we’re leaving palaeolithic times and coming (almost) up to date with the local road bridge. A local history page tells me the brick-built version, which is still here today, is around 240 years old and that it had a steel footpath structure added to one side of it in 1926, separating foot traffic from vehicles. It had been there in one form or another, mostly wooden, since ‘at least the early 11th century’. Critically, it crosses the river Adur, allowing easier access for populations developing on either side of what has, at times, been a wide waterway, and at other times, a banked-up and fast-flowing river in the middle of an historical flood plain. This last is where the You Are Here arrow is currently located. So it’s old; it’s seen a lot; there are carp and mallards, swans, and kingfishers; gulls of various kinds, the occasional seal, and for many years the most unruly annual boat race you ever saw in your life. And the tide crashes up and down beneath it four times a day, every day of every year.

26th April 2026. The more I looked at those deep water creatures, the more I wanted to animate them. The inserted clips are from an earlier video I made on the same theme, and the audio is a manipulated edit of a track via Freesound. Lower and slower!

25th April 2026. Voila – a pair of swamp fish as yet unclassified by science. Anyone wanting to give it a go should know their skin is made of paint-soaked paper towel roll and I’ve no idea how they breathe. The water here is wilder than we would usually see it and the tree line much more extensive and further away. Have you spotted the contemporary element though? Even better, do you recognise it?

24th April 2026. Hayfever is not a friend of creatives and probably isn’t much help to locksmiths, paramedics or supermarket delivery drivers. But here we are, and out of this episode emerged a ‘name that palaeolithic swamp fish mega blighter’ competition [no, not really]. It began as one of the lakes in the new nature reserve down the fields below the green bridge that’s actually called the White bridge, but that place does have a sense of time hanging in the air, waiting to pull you back into its history.

23rd April 2026. Added an augmented reality (AR) layer to the poster. This involves making a video layer of some sort, in this case a music track and a shower of spring green leaves, and applying it in an app called Artivive to the target image – the one I want to activate the AR. I use a variety of apps for this. MotionLeap* (Lightricks) is good for animation – creating movement like flowing water or swaying foliage, as is PhotoDirector by Cyberlink, both of which can make other adjustments such as saturation, hue, light/dark and so forth. Sometimes I use this as it is, but more often I take it into a video editing suite such as PowerDirector, (also by Cyberlink), or Movavi where I can cut, clip, lengthen and shorten individual sections and also add an audio track. I often use recordings I’ve made outdoors as sound effects but sometimes a piece of music is called for. For this, I use Freesound where music and odd pieces of audio are hosted for composers looking for exposure rather than cash. Artivive also gives creators access to a range of still and animated images and models but you have to keep the total file size to a maximum of 300MB. AudioDirector is good for editing your own sounds or copyright-free tracks where changes are permitted (always read the small print!), but I’ve found Magix Music Maker,which sounds like a toy but is actually quite heavy duty if you’re hovering on the edge of pre-professional quality, excellent for rearranging and merging tracks. Well, that was quite the schoolday, wasn’t it! The video is below. Or you could download the Artivive app to your mobile device (it’s free) and point it at the poster on-screen. But if you’re a local, you could nip over to the Churchside cafe and point it at the one upfront and centre in the cafe while Reuben gets you a coffee!

*MotionLeap. I’d post a link but bringing it up on my PC shows me a product I barely recognise. It’s primarily for use on mobile devices where I never see such material, so maybe try accessing it from there.

2nd April 2026. The posters, flyers, and cards just arrived. Might have to open them. Did. They’re wonderful and some are out in the wild now at the Churchside Cafe for which another big thank you is due to Reuben. I may have left him some extras …
So now there’s one in my porch window which means there’s no backing out. Deep breath.

20^th April 2026. The two sets of butchers’ hooks I ordered arrived yesterday. One set looks as though the hook, while being fine for the painting end, may not be so suited to the pole. The others are absolutely big enough and could easily stand in as weaponry in a horror film.  COVID booster today which means I’ll be semi-comatose for at least one day followed by two days of confident but incoherent babbling. Believe nothing until at least Friday.

19th April 2026. Spent a little while looking online at display easels so I have somewhere to put the painting (still) titled ‘Transience’, then realised I already have one. It’s light and transportable, although not necessarily cooperative when it comes to staying upright. It will need to go in a corner. The rest will be canvases which already have a built-in hanging facility – the wooden frames over which the canvas is stretched. A bag of butchers’ hooks should do the rest. The next little while will be all about selecting the pieces of work to exhibit. There are three criteria. They have to be suitable for a family audience, my best work to date (no barrel-scrapers), and, critically, dry so no one goes home with half a landscape on their jacket sleeve. Here’s one candidate, a tiny thing weighing in at 20x15cm.

18th April 2026. We’ve settled on June 6th and 13th. Both Saturdays, so lots of passing traffic. Poster on its way. Stay tuned! Here’s the proto-poster. Changing the text box fill was problematic until I found the hidden toolbar in Paintshop Pro! Signed off now by Reuben.

Venue below. What3Words: hedge.into.loudness

17th April 2026. This is planned for early June. The venue is an outdoor but covered cafe that sits on the end of the community hut (Bevan Hall) belonging to the church just opposite. The covers come off in the summer. At this point, I’ve made an informal approach to Reuben, the owner of the cafe, received a very enthusiastic response, gained permission from the vicar (via Reuben who did this almost overnight and before I’d even asked, for which a massive thank you), and now we’re into the nitty-gritty of dates. What3Words: hedge.into.loudness

The run-up: I’m an art school drop-out. Started the Foundation year at Brighton College of Art the same year humans first went to the moon. Massive cultural mis-match between Bradford (Satanic mills and smog) and Brighton’s total hippie Flower Power peace n luuurv baby. Went home. Did other things. 2026 and just as NASA takes people back to the moon, I’m on the verge of graduating with a BA (Hons) in Painting via the Open College of the Arts (Open University), hashtag:nevertoolate.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026