Hello. I’m Emily. Mostly, I want to draw, paint, create, and bring my very own kind of light, warmth, colour and creativity to the world.
And I love writing too. I love to read, and I love the power and beauty of words.
“I know nothing in the world that has as much power as a word. Sometimes I write one, and I look at it until it begins to shine.” Emily Dickinson
And I love the idea of sharing my words and story on a platform where people come for longform narrative, community and connection.
I have loved reading
by and by , so beautifully written here on Substack that drew me in and encouraged me to share some of my own story.So here is an introduction to me,
, accountant by day, illustrator by night.I’ll do my best not to ramble, keep the grammatical errors and typos to a minimum and I hope that you enjoy what you read. If my stories resonate, if you feel a connection through my (potentially inept) prose, please do comment and let me know. I’m excited to be part of this new(ish) community.
Where to start
When I was considering what to write in this post, as an introduction about where it all started for me, I realised that I had to go all the way back to the beginning, to my earliest memories.
I have always loved to create and to draw. I am enthralled and mesmerised by enchanting and beautiful imagery and the desire to capture the beauty in the world in some creative way, has always been a part of me.
For a while during my childhood we didn’t have a TV, so my big sis and I filled our time with arts and crafts, encouraged by Mum and Dad. We made playdoh models of tortoises and clothes for our dolls. We dabbled in woodcarving, created models from polymer clay and we drew, and drew and drew. Mum read us stories before bed and we drew pictures while we listened. I drew horses and birds, tree roots and eagles, flowers and quaint country cottages. I drew a cray fish from a picture in a wildlife book and I would scour the other books from Mum and Dad's bookshelves looking for inspiration.
We lived in a little village in the English countryside, where Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire meet. we had dogs and a cat and spent a lot of time outside in nature, walking, cycling, playing in the garden and climbing trees.
My love of art and creativity; of animals, nature and the outdoors are the enduring legacy from my childhood.
I got an A* for GCSE Art the first year A* was a thing and I won the school prize for art & music. I ‘knew’ I’d never earn a living through art or music, so after A levels, I had a number of ‘sensible’ administrative jobs and at 23, ended up in Finance at B&Q.
Having a sensible job
I discovered a flair for accounting and my finance career took off. I studied accounting, progressing through a variety of different roles, qualifying as a Chartered Management Accountant with fancy letters after my name and everything!
Through the years, I continued to draw and paint in my spare time. I went through a phase of creating hand made cards and filled the spare room with stamps and punches, stickers and handmade paper and all the paraphernalia of card making (I still have a fair bit stashed away in my studio now!) I longed to have the time and freedom to again draw and create whatever and whenever I wanted. And I wanted to be ‘good’ at it.
I got the chance to explore and develop my drawing skills when I had to take a couple of weeks off work after an operation. I wanted to be able to draw realistic animals so I spent some time researching ‘how to draw realistic fur’ and I discovered the work of Mike Sibley, who creates the most amazing fine art pencil drawings. I bought his book, ‘Drawing from Line to Life’, and I devoured it from cover to cover. I went to one of Mike’s drawing workshops and spend an amazing weekend in Glastonbury, learning new pencil drawing techniques and wandering round the beautiful town and enjoying the quirky and mystical shops.
I experimented with different pencils and paper types, and I fell in love with detailed and realistic graphite pencil work. From old boots to sleeping tigers, I drew whatever took my fancy.
Each of the drawings I created between 2008 and 2013 has a different story and personal meaning for me, and they fit together into my fine art collections, ‘Soul and Life’, and ‘The Wild’.
Drawing realistic and detailed animal pictures became a fascination for me, and I also started drawing dog portraits of my own dogs and those of my friends and family. I did some people portraits too, but my love of animals won out and drawing animals (dogs in particular) is something that I continue to enjoy doing to this day.
My drawing took a bit of a backseat as my career evolved and we had our two beautiful children, Katelyn and Thomas. After 13 years at B&Q, I moved jobs and started working for the NHS.
Illustrating for the NHS
Working for the NHS, I found opportunities to explore my creative side again. I co-designed a development session for the Finance Team and created a set of graphic facilitation templates. I didn’t realise what they were at the time, but I loved the idea of incorporating hand drawn graphics into the team away days as a fun and engaging way to generate and capture ideas and solve problems. I drew some doodles as a memory aid for myself during a week long training event and did some small illustrations for the staff magazine. Different people across the trust started to see my work and ask me to create visuals for their projects, and Thomkat Illustrations (named for Thomas and Katelyn) was born.
I created my first paid commission in March 2019 for Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust; an infographic describing what mental health ward rounds with respect and dignity should look like from the patient’s perspective. It’s hard to describe how much it meant to me to use my creativity to bring to life their voices in such a powerful and compelling way.
A whole new style
Creating these more informal and colourful drawings for the NHS opened up a new style of illustration that I hadn’t explored before. Compared to the fine art graphite pencil drawings, they were much quicker to create but no less satisfying. Instead of taking weeks or months to complete, I could finish a picture over a couple of days, making tangible progress in smaller snippets, rather than needing to devote several hours at a time to concentrated, detailed pencil work.
I could draw a little character picture for a birthday card or anniversary, or little stylised family portrait in just an hour or two.
The process of dreaming up the different and unique images to capture the various concepts also started my mind working in a different way. I’d read a document and think up ways to make it more understandable and memorable. I would hear a quote and imagine a little picture in my mind to represent it.
I began creating drawings to illustrate personalised affirmations and the words that people were choosing for their word of the year. I drew little character pictures and got them printed on mugs as gifts. As more people were seeing my work, I started getting personal requests for illustrations in this different style from individual customers. I drew a Christmas card design for friends of their beautiful Chateau in France, a special picture of a beloved niece and a market stall full of flowers. Just for the joy of it, I drew a series of summer scenes for an art competition and put them together into a collection that I have called ‘Tranquil Times’, to capture the peace and tranquillity of lazy summer days, and then got them printed on cushions, mugs, tea towels, coasters and placemats.
My business soul mate
“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” W.B. Yeats.
I started to share my work on social media, and on Instagram, I found my business soul mate, Lydia Saward. I stumbled across her blog through our mutual love of crystals and I fell in love with her uplifting, funny and light writing style.
I devoured all of her blog posts, and Lydia ordered one of my personalised affirmations prints.
We started chatting and it became clear to me that Lydia wanted to do with words, what I wanted to do with pictures.
We teamed up to create illustrated poems, with Lydia’s words and my pictures, and early in 2021 our ‘Written by Lyds, Drawn by Thomkat’ collaboration was born.
What if?
For a while, Thomkat Illustrations was my little side hustle, drawing in the evenings and at weekends. Making a career out of my passion was just a daydream. But more and more people started to commission me, strangers who didn’t really know me other than they loved my work, and I started to wonder ‘what if’?
What if I am good enough? What if I can do this? I’d always thought I’d end my career as a Finance Director, but what if I’m allowed to change my mind? So I did.
On 1st May 2021, I set up Thomkat Illustrations as a limited company. 3 months later I left my job in the NHS behind. I was terrified. I was overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, but I knew that if I didn’t at least try, I would always wonder ‘what if’…
After 18 months as a full time illustrator, I returned to a part-time finance role. Those months were not all cupcakes and rainbows; I had a hefty whack of disappointments, jobs that I though were a shoo-in that didn’t materialise, things that I invested in not turning out to be quite what I’d hoped, but I have absolutely no regrets.
What now?
I am still excited and inspired every day by all the things that I would like to create and draw. The joy I feel holding my pencil keeps me going when things get tough. The relaxation that comes as I flood my pictures with colour, eases the worry. The explosion of ideas that fill my head when I walk into my studio on my days off, they keep me going, they give me purpose.
I draw because it lights my soul and makes my heart sing. And with each piece that I draw, the stories behind them, the understanding that they bring, the truth that they share, the emotion they create, the memories they capture; I hope to create a little moment of understanding, of magic, of beauty in the world.
If you’ve enjoyed reading this intro and want to know more, please do subscribe to While I Was Drawing here on Substack as I share more of my journey as an artist and illustrator, and things I’ve lived and loved and learned.