A Dark and Spicy End to the Year (and announcing some exciting changes...)

Happy (almost) New Year! I hope you had a lovely holiday and are excited to kick off 2022.

We're ending 2021 in style with this week's launch. The dark sister to my Pearl pack, Noir showcases glamorous and sultry accessories. Lace, mesh, chains and satin come together to create a soft but dangerous look. This pack has a mix of smoldering poses and more playful ones, so there's plenty to suit whatever vibe you need!

Simply click the button at the bottom of this email to get the pack.

Announcement

This year has been unexpectedly fantastic. It has been incredibly fulfilling and fruitful, both in my personal and professional life, and a huge part of that has been these reference packs and the community we've formed together. With the exception of two, I launched a new reference pack every single week and marveled at the artwork you created with them. That was never the plan, but I came to love the consistency (something I've really struggled to obtain as a professional artist), and before long, it became my primary endeavour. I became accountable in a way I have never achieved and no matter how tough, I always found a way to stay on track.

The downside of this approach is, of course, that we begin to treat it like a grind. It was easier in the beginning when my library was so small to come up with new, high impact ideas in such high volumes, but as the year went by and my library filled out I found the hustle becoming less impactful. "Inspiring" made way to "good enough" -something that I believe we should be more comfortable with, but that began to take from the joy of creation- and I started to think in terms of what might be helpful for the most people rather than what I might most enjoy making.

Reference was always a passion project, a happy accident, and was never supposed to be a job. My best work happens when I do it because I love it, not because launch day is coming and I better pull something out of the hat. As such, for the foreseeable future...

I'm going to let go of the weekly release model and simply create reference when I want to.

Putting that out there is oddly scary (especially as reference is my primary income), but I believe it's necessary to create the best reference I am capable of and to create more space in my life for my art.

As always, I will send an email and post to my Instagram when new reference is released (and there will still be plenty of it!) but there will be fewer releases now, and more premium releases when they come. I want to push my reference to the next level, and that's hard to do when I'm harbouring a "good enough" mindset.

It's my hope that, with the time and mental energy this move will free up, I will be able to really push my art and create something really big this year. Art fell to the wayside for me as reference took priority, and I'm excited to see what might happen when I prioritise it again. If you want to see that, too, be sure to keep an eye on these emails, or on my social media. As ever, I'll be sure to sure my journey.

I have a feeling 2022 is going to be an amazing year. Thank you for everything you did to make 2021 just that.

All the best,

Rachel