Vlog: Spend a (rainy!) creative day in Spain with me!

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Hey, how are you? I hope you are having a really lovely day. I am currently in Spain on the Costa Blanca. I've been here for a week and a half and at the moment I am in a little town on the coast called Altea.

It's a really kind of lovely traditional Spanish town. The old town's all cobbled streets and whitewashed buildings. It's really beautiful and I am staying in this amazing apartment which is, as you can see, a bit kind of arty and it's got quite a nice like rustic industrial feel to it.

So that's been really fun and I thought what I would do is give you a little bit of a tour of the town. It's actually been raining a little bit whilst I've been here so I took myself on a rainy walk around Altea to see if I could get a little bit of creative inspiration.

So I've come out to Spain on my own. I do really love taking solo trips but they do force me to get out of my comfort zone a bit. One of the reasons I started my own business in the first place was because I really wanted to be able to have the freedom and flexibility to travel and visit new places and do that without having to be limited by the constraints of holidays that you take from your office nine to five. I know that it's, you know, really difficult to kind of break free from that and throughout the course of the last 10 years when I have been running my business I've been working on and off in various different jobs, full-time and part-time.

My last one was a full-time role which I've just recently left again which is very exciting. I've always been doing communications and marketing which I really love and, you know, that's been really great for my own business as well because now I've got a lot of transferable skills from marketing other businesses which I can bring into my own business and which I can also use to help other handmade business owners. So yeah, I've come out to Spain on my own solo trip!

It's been really great. I have been in over to Spain on my own before. I'm trying to learn Spanish although I have to admit I'm not putting in quite as much work as I should be so my next step is to try and properly learn Spanish - so if you have any tips please let me know.

So yeah, solo travel I find it does really push me to get out of my comfort zone and think of new things that I want to do, and get over some of my own fears and limitations. So something I found on this trip because I've had a few niggling issues with my back which means I'm not as active as I perhaps always would want to be, but I've been making sure that I go on a daily walk and also spending as much time as I can just on foot exploring the local area. I always find that when I'm walking that's when my ideas come to me as well if I can kind of get myself into the moment and normally what happens is I have a load of chitter-chatter in my brain but then as I walk the chatter begins to quieten down.

I think it must be something to do with the repetitive movement of walking and then eventually my mind will clear a bit. I'll start to spark ideas and new things will start percolating in my mind. So that's one thing that I've been really embracing that process and letting it happen whenever I can. Another thing that I really love doing when I go out on walks is just taking my phone or my camera (I haven't got my actual camera with me but I've got my phone and you know mobile phone cameras are so brilliant now) so I'll take that out with me and see what I can see and kind of just really look for little interesting visual cues that I can take pictures of.

Of course you've got the lovely scenery, you've got the architecture, things like that are really inspiring but also little things like a plant growing through the rocks, or an unusual corner on a building or even a street sign or something like that. I'll take my camera and just snap them - I really like the process of looking for things that I think will make an interesting photograph because I find that it helps me to look at my environment in a different way.

So something that happened whilst I was here which I wasn't expecting is I was on a walk the other day and as I said it's beautiful whitewashed architecture here, you've got the gorgeous turquoise sea in the background, the sun is shining, it's really lovely, it is a really artistic town so it's been really inspiring in that respect as well, and kind of on a spur of the moment I kind of got the idea of seeing if I could start painting some of the views which I saw. I have done painting before, I used to love painting when I was younger, I haven't done any painting though for really quite a long time so I popped on Google, found that there was a really sweet little art shop up in the old town so I popped up there and got myself just this really simple little watercolour case and just a pencil and some paintbrushes and a pen and I decided that I was going to do some painting.

So I've got into a little bit of a routine where I'll get up in the morning, potter around because I'm in an apartment that means I can make myself some breakfast or some lunch as well. I'll go out for a walk in the morning whilst it's not too hot and then come back to the apartment and do a little bit of sketching or painting. I don't actually do it whilst I'm outside, I like to sit on a table when I'm doing creative work like that and I also find it much easier to work from an image that I've taken because then you've got the natural border which is helping me to frame my pictures.

So I've managed to get a bank of different photos of different views around the town that I want to start sketching and drawing. The first day I did a practice run and then I have been gradually honing my technique as I go. I realised that I don't really like lots of hard pen so I've started using the pen after I've done the painting. I'll do a drawing in pencil then I'll do the paint a little bit of a wash of paint and then I'll go in afterwards to highlight certain areas with the pen, but not with really harsh hard lines over the whole thing because that's just not the feel I like.

I like it to be a little bit more fluid so I will share with you some of the pictures that I've been doing. This is the pad that I picked up, it's just a watercolour paper pad in order to do my kind of sketches. I'm going to show you what I've been doing, it's really rough and ready, I haven't painted for a while.

I'm not doing these with the thought of becoming a watercolour painter or selling them, I'm doing them really for the fun of it and the love of it and to see what I create. I'm trying to let go of the expectation of creating something amazing and wonderful right off the bat. I do know that as creators, as artists, we do want to create things that are beautiful and lovely and that we feel proud of.

As much as people say it's all about the creative process, yes it is, but also there's something about producing something that you feel really happy with, that you know you've put your all into and that you know looks beautiful which is ultimately really satisfying. Maybe it's an unpopular opinion but I do truly believe that we love creating beauty and that's one of the reasons that we do what we do. Anyway on that note I will show you what I have been doing because I'm kind of thinking of it as practice and honing my style.

I know with my jewellery making it's taken me a lot of time and energy and years to get to the point now where I've got my particular style and I have particular techniques which I've managed to master and so yeah I am enjoying the process but I'm also hoping to produce something that I feel is beautiful and that I'm proud of. So I've done some little flowers. I absolutely love painting flowers.

I've just been trying out different techniques here for painting the petals and we've got one of the larger flowers in the middle. This was a flower that I saw when I was up in the old town doing a walk and I just really loved the colours and then this is one of the street scenes which I have done. So you can see there it's quite simple and I've been practicing using the pen and ink in a way that I feel happy with.

You can see this is the flower at the front that I was doing a more detailed one in the previous picture. Something I love about this town are these street lamps which are all littered throughout the old town and they're really just, I don't know, they're really cool. I didn't really realise they were going to be there and they look great.

And if you're new to my page and we haven't met yet my name is Rebecca. My business is called Rebecca Lucy. I'm a jewellery designer maker and I specialise in silver clay jewellery.

I teach workshops both in person and online. I also work with other handmade business owners to help you elevate your own handmade business through marketing and through beautiful websites.