June Love Letter: Be inspired by yourself

I can't believe it is already June. I've had a busy May and I'm excited to share with you everything I've been working on.

A couple of days ago I just finished one of the biggest projects I've ever tackled. It is also the first project I have collaborated on with my partner Dan. Over the past month we have created something called a Full Dome film, which is a film specifically made to be shown in planetariums. It was really cool working in this new format. I had a lot of technical learning curves to tackle, but it was exciting getting to experiment with video in a totally different way. The film consists of several TouchDesigner renderings mixed with video from my iPhone and 360 camera. Dan wrote the score for the film, and it was so much fun collaborating with him on this. One of the prints in this month's mail club is a still from a video to give you an idea of what it looks like. We are still fine tuning the final rendering, but I can’t wait to share it with you. It is one of the coolest things I have ever made.

June’s Mail Club

The theme for this month is Being Inspired by Yourself. In the public art class that I took back in April, there was an artist that came and spoke to us. Her best advice for getting inspired is to not look on Pinterest or Instagram, where you start to get imposter syndrome and compare yourself to others, but to start to look at your previous work and be inspired by yourself.

I leaned on this advice a lot when creating the Full Dome film. The 2nd print for this month is a painting I did last year that is one of my favorites, so much that it's on the front page of my website. I drew from it not only the color palette but also the form and texture when creating some of my renderings.

The sticker sheet is some of my experiments in learning illustration. As someone with ADHD, I find that my mind bounces from medium to medium almost daily. One minute I'm doing illustration, the next I'm learning TouchDesigner, and then tomorrow I’m coming up with public art projects. Honestly, I wouldn't want it any other way. I think all of my work is connected and influences each other. So my challenge for you this month, if you're feeling a little uninspired, is to go and look at your past work. Pick out what you like or pick out what you didn't like. See if there's something that you can reinvent or something that you can be inspired by. Feel free to share with me on Instagram or TikTok: @annarichards.art.

June is going to be a very busy month ahead. Here in Austin, there are several places to go and watch films. Dan and I go watch old movies at least once a week at one of the local art-house cinemas. This past month we watched Amadeus, Moulin Rouge, and a documentary about python hunting in Florida. June is packed full of even more screenings, I’m sure there will be lots of movie recommendations in July’s letter.

If you would like to purchase June’s mail club mailing, you can shop past mail clubs here. can join The Club for July’s mailing by signing up here by June 15th.

Thanks for reading, thanks for being here. I hope you have a wonderful month!

Love & light

-anna