This pattern, called “Unicorns in the Garden,” was inspired by a notebook that I filled up with watercolour paintings from March-April 2023.

During the winter, I went through a period of burnout in my personal life. It wasn’t a work related burnout; I kept painting and drawing and writing and making. In fact, making art was about the only thing I could do without a struggle. I had a couple of family issues, illnesses and a family death that all converged at the same time, combined with the loss of two important friendships for different reasons, a messy expensive renovation that had unplanned problems, all the other normal life stuff, entering middle age, and a sprinkle of some post-covid fatigue on top. Bam, recipe for a burnout. I don’t want to go into the details because I believe in that saying, “If we all threw our troubles in a pile, we would take ours back again.” It was a rough time but I knew it would pass (and it did) and the details are not worth going into here, because my life is pretty amazing and I hate complaining.

What I do want to share is how art helps me through times like this.

Every day I got through the chores, kid things, life things and the work things that I HAD to do. Then I would sit with my sketchbook, and fill up the pages with watercolour paintings like this:

If you read my big long process post, “How I Make Everything,” you will know that during the first phase of my art making I don’t question what I am doing. I paint what I am drawn to and I follow the joy. That’s it! If it is fun I keep making it. If I am curious, I keep making it. These are the only things I respond to. I liked working in this indigo blue colour, so I did that more. I painted lots of doodley trees and flowers. Pages and pages of trees…

Then I drew a girl holding a baby unicorn. That’s when I felt really excited, and knew something was going to happen.

Over the course of the next month I couldn’t wait to get through the busy/harder part of my day to sit with this notebook. Something was happening and I didn’t know what, but I knew if I kept working the answer would unfold. I wrote little lines that came to me while I drew, little snippets of stories? or poems? (Time will tell!) This curious feeling toward this notebook kept my hands busy, my brain distracted from the other things happening around me. It was a happy escape.

One evening I flipped through the pages of the entire notebook, and I started to cry, because I knew what these unicorns and their friends meant to me. I was nurturing myself, caring for myself in a difficult time by drawing in the notebook. I was drawing girls caring for themselves and each other; there was a girl off picking flowers alone, two braiding each others’ hair, one girl reading on her own. There were little unicorn babies near by; but the girls weren’t necessarily nurturing them; it was more like the unicorns were close to them-a parallel play scenario? The girls and the unicorn were together, but next to eachother. I was living in a time where I had to take care of my self and my mental health so that I could care for my family and my kids. It was necessary for me to stop and take breaks. I think this mode of living seeped into my artwork, and I spent my days drawing girls taking care of each other, and also taking alone time for themselves so that they could be better care givers for their little unicorns. During this time, I leaned on friends for support. It helped to have other women in my life who knew what it was like to have this type of burnout; to be grateful for your life but unable to participate fully in it, to feel guilt for taking time for yourself but knowing it was important to do it. The girls caring for each other in these images represent this appreciation for the female relationships in my life.

I was also thinking about getting older. I drew two girls decorating an older woman’s hair. My husband lost his father in the fall, and his mother passed away 20 years ago this year. This made me think about my own parents aging, and also about me aging, and how the kids are getting older….and so it goes.

If I don’t necessarily know what I am making yet, I play around with the images as different products. This is the second part of my process. I thought about making an art print; but that didn’t feel right. I tried the images on a greeting card; but the meaningfulness of the images got lost in the small scale. I then decided these images could be a really unique wallpaper pattern, especially since I had so may girls piling up in my sketchbook. It took many tries, but I digitally combined all my sketches into one pattern, and filled in the spaces with hand painted blue flowers. I love it! From a distance, it has a toille pattern effect; If you get up close, you can find all the different girls and unicorns hidden in the pattern.