welcome to cloudtopia !
this week is a bit of a shorter newsletter as we head into the month of june, as I wanted to share my progress on my calendar project!
Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been creating one calendar page for each month of 2025, which I’m illustrating with doodles and sketches, each around a different theme or motif. They’re not fancy or particularly polished, but it has been a really wonderful way for me to practice some artistic skills and ensure that I find some time each month to work on something creative amidst the busyness of the year so far. I’ve had a lot of fun taking the time for sketching and putting together a new illustration every few weeks, and it has been delightful to put these up on my wall each month and keep track of dates and appointments and the general passage of time.
As we head into June, I have now completed six months of the calendar, so it is officially halfway done! To celebrate, I’m collecting them here. Hopefully, the next six months will be soon to follow.
The last month went by too quickly, I feel like I never quite caught up with it. Here in Ireland, we had a few glorious weeks of summer weather, sun and warmth transforming the landscape of life on the island.
Everywhere flowers bloomed and made me sneeze a lot. I got to watch a lot of weird and cool vampire movies as part of a screening series at a local arts space.
I practiced making fancy coffees and iced matchas at home, experimenting in my kitchen with new ways to make fun drinks and stop spending all my money in Dublin cafes.
I spent a beautiful weekend on the shore of Lough Erne in County Fermanagh, the sun so bright the entire countryside seemed to be glowing. In Enniskillen, we tried a coconut and tonka pastry that I have been thinking about every day since lol.
I’ve been writing all the time, thinking and rethinking, and I finally feel like I’m making progress on my research work as I approach the end of my first year as a ph.d candidate!
Life moves quick, these days, but it keeps moving.
I hope June will be a gentle month, full of light and love. I have a few newsletters scheduled to share with you over the next few weeks, and I am excited to share some more art discussions with you soon, including the next instalment of my recent museum gaze series, plus a return to the hyper niche art world of palaeontology! I think we’re due to talk about films again soon, and I am also planning out another fashion newsletter where we’ll be talking more about digital wardrobes and similar topics, as I’ve gotten a lot of feedback and questions on that topic lately. We’ll see how it all goes, but I can’t wait to share some new letters in the coming weeks. As always, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch if you have any ideas for future programming :-)
thank you so much for reading! if you enjoy cloudtopia, it would mean the world if you would subscribe or share with a friend. I’ll be back to you soon with another full newsletter. In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a classic newsletter that will be turning one year old next week(!):
your body is a battleground
A few weeks later, and I still don’t feel quite like myself, but I’m getting nearer.
dreaming of june,
isobel