Detail | Kate McCalmont-Woods

I love this time of year. The hedgerows are full of hawthorn blossom and clouds of cow parsley, there are blue carpets of bluebells in the woods, if a little threadbare by now, swathes of flowering wild garlic, crops growing in the fields and trees in full leaf.

I took my daughter back to uni in Exeter a week or so ago: a lovely drive down the A303 past Stonehenge, under the mystical big skies of Wiltshire and the rambling green fields of Somerset and Devon. On the way back I took the alternate route through Dorset along the Jurassic Coast and stopped off at Athelhampton House, a Tudor manor house I haven’t visited for a number of years with a very strong connection to Thomas Hardy. I didn’t know that Hardy was an architect before he became a writer and that he had worked on the house with his father, or even that he had lived into the early part of the 20th century. He seems to belong to a different time.

The gardens are wonderful – a house with many rooms (this seems to be a recurring theme recently).

Inside, apart from some wonderfully old glass windows which distorted the view outside,

was an exhibition of work by Arthur Neal, a painter and printmaker practising since the 1970s. He appears to vacillate between the figurative and the abstract. It would have been difficult to guess that all of the works on display were made by the same artist. I was particularly drawn to his small abstract oil paintings, his work in charcoal and his more recent prints.

The exhibition made me think. I would still like to explore charcoal and drypoint, and after that I think I’ll be done. It will be time to reflect.

The small oil paintings reminded me of a stack of small canvas boards we’ve had for ages, as yet unused. I can’t recall why we got them – I don’t generally do small. I think my husband bought them because they fit in a small pochard box he is going to use for all those landscapes sketches he’s going to paint, once he has wiped off all the dust. It wouldn’t take more than a few brush strokes to cover them. No excuse really, not to do something every day.

I have a fascination with Jackson’s Inside the sketchbook series – of looking at the sketchbooks of artists, to see how they work and think. Sketchbooks are personal spaces and it’s exciting to get to look inside, although I’m in no doubt that they choose to talk about their best ones. A recent one which springs to mind is Unga from Broken Fingaz. He talks about how working small means that you have to let go of detail. I think I’ll give it a go.

I have had an image in my mind for months. It came from the Elizabeth Stone quotation, I first mentioned in Hearts & Linos .

”Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”

I think it encapsulates perfectly how I felt when I became a mother. My whole world was turned upside down. I was suddenly responsible for raising and protecting another human being. I felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all; that life would never be the same again. It made me question the sort of world I had brought her into, how her life might be; how much of it I would be a part of, the unthinkable and unbearable pain I would suffer if anything happened to her. She was precious and intrinsic to me, now living and breathing in the world, independently of me.

It’s taken a while. Bearing in mind that I’m still finding my way around Procreate I don’t think that I’ve done too badly. I’m sure that I’ve done lots of things incorrectly, but I don’t really care. It’s all a learning process and it was fundamentally about me trying to realise an image that I had in my head. I feel that I’ve achieved what I set out to do. In that respect, I’m pleased with it. I think it conveys the visceral nature of my feelings.

Actually, it has taken me more than a while; it’s taken ages, probably because I kept on making mistakes, but I have learnt lots along the way. I’ve redone parts of it several times but I have to say that it has all been about the process of discovery and realisation. It’s allowed me time to focus on the detail, but it’s been as part of the process rather than with a view to trying to achieve a perfect result. I don’t think that Procreate is a tool with which I can be loose and expressive in the physical sense, but it seems to satisfy that part of me that likes to focus on surreal detail every now and then. Hopefully that will allow the other part of me to enjoy the experimentation of being looser and more expressive in my mark-making when, say, painting.

I decided ages ago that I wanted to incorporate my ink experiments as a background to a collage type piece. I sourced the heart, crawling baby and head of the woman from royalty free image sites which allow for reproduction of the resultant work, if need be. The body is my daughter. She’s a bit freaked out by someone else’s head being on it, but I wanted a neutral character, and I couldn’t find an image of a woman sitting on a chair that fitted my requirements, so I roped in a free model.

It was challenging constructing the crawling heart. I’ve had to rebuild parts of it including the hands as some of the fingers were hidden in the original image. It was quite difficult finding source images whose licences allowed me to do what I wanted to do, and were also free. I’ve played around with editing effects and colours and I think that I’m settled on the last image for now. The slight greenish tones, complement the red heart. I really like the cyanotypes, but unfortunately there isn’t enough tonal variation and the slightly chaotic background loses its delicate tonal transitions in the process. I might try again but change the background to something a little less busy. But I like the historical, almost Victorian Penny Dreadful feel to them. I might develop it further, but I’ll leave it on the back burner for now.

The time delay video created by Procreate is of epic proportions, but it’s helpful for me to watch it back so I can see what a song and dance I made of it all. This is a shortened version.