It's twelve years now since I discovered sketching. By that I mean everyday sketching, everywhere sketching, making art of the world around you part of your daily life. Even though I had been an artist and a woking one, at that since the age of fourteen, I had never carried around my sketching stuff with me as a matter of course.

All that changed in 2012 when my family and I made the bold move to live on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean for six months. Mauritius is many things: a honeymoon destination, a tropical paradise, a peaceful country, a centre of business entrepreneurship from the single old lady selling a couple of mangoes on the roadside to tech startups. And it's where my passion for sketching was born simply because my mother insisted that I would open her birthday gift to me while I was there. The gift, a prettilywrapped, pink beribboned book I stuffed into my suitcase, ended up changing my life. (Mothers! They are our personal angels.)

I started by sketching the birthday gifts my kids had given me and by the time we left the island I had sketched everything from religious buildings there are a lot of them in Mauritius to markets and turquoise lagoons, to the Mauritians who came and stared at my sketching activities and entertained me with their chatter. I even wrote a memoir about my time there, which I still hope to publish. (That was really my first book, even though it remains a manuscript on a hard drive somewhere.)

Sketching changed everything for me. It is the reason I have a career, but much more than that it's brought me serenity and a deep satisfaction. We all need to express ourselves as humans, and for some reason sketching fits the bill for me. I know it does for so many of you too, and that's the WHY of my evangelical passion for teaching.

There'll be lots more stuff about my time in Mauritius because you';ve told me you would like to hear more if that's you too, then you should subscribe to my blog, which is on my website, roisincure.com.

I hope you enjoy the video of sketching the yummy cake too!

Feeling quite peckish now :)

Happy sketching and I will see you next time!

Róisín