Hello! Better late than never I guess!

Hello all,
So I've just realised that I've never actually introduced myself properly on the forum, apologies for just bursting right in recently haha!
My name is Hannah McCaffery and I'm from the seaside town of Llandudno in beautiful Wales, UK and it is ALWAYS raining hehe!
I came across the SVS podcast on twitter and I've loved it right from the start. Not only is it comforting to me to listen to other illustrators talk about the business, but I've learnt so so much and each podcast motivates me in some new way - so thank you Will, Jake and Lee

I've been illustrating since I was small, and after doing an Art Diploma in college, I went on to study Illustration at Loughborough University. Turned out that I hated it as they tried to make me illustrate in a way that wasn't natural to me and I ended up failing miserably, so I started afresh at Glyndwr University near my home and studied Illustration for Children's Publishing.
After graduating in 2013, I was lucky enough to be signed with The Organisation illustration agency after exhibiting my work at New Designers in London. I was signed with them until fairly recently, and during that time with them I illustrated 13 educational books for Heinemann and Scholastic whilst working part time too.
I decided to leave my agency a few months ago as I felt like i'd lost my identity as an illustrator (I detested drawing anything and it really showed in my work so my agent struggled to find me any paid work) and i needed to take a step back to start right from the beginning, so hopefully I'll be signed with another agency again when I've got a sparkly new portfolio.

I'm so glad that I've found this forum full of wonderful artists, everyone is so friendly, supportive and constructive and it's so comforting to have a hub that I can now go to to talk about anything to do with illustration
You're all fab!
Sorry for rambling on...haha!

Oh and I dont have a website at the moment to see my work as I'm going to make one as soon as I've got some new work to put on there. But I'm on instagram as '@hannahmccaffery' and on Twitter as @hmillustration

Phil Cullen

Hi Hannah, I just checked out your Instagram your work is lovely. I'm kinda new to the forum too and found it through the podcast, such a great resource. I wish you all the best with the new portfolio and the hunt for a new agent.

@phil-cullen Thank you Phil! That means a lot

demotlj

@hannahmccaffery I sympathize with your lack of sunny weather. I was trying to do a landscape with a blue sky and looked through my personal photos to find a reference but all of my pictures showed overcast gray skies! I live in western NY state, US where the prevailing winds come across the Great Lakes and dump their moisture on us. It sounds like I’d feel right at home in Wales.