Since coming back to Storm Cat, I’ve spent a surprising amount of time thinking about what it actually means to come back to something.

For a while, I think part of me imagined returning as picking up where I left off. I would reopen the shop, dust off the blog, pull out my old projects and eventually settle back into being the person who made all of those things in the first place.

Except I’m not that person anymore.

That’s probably most obvious when I look at my art.

During my time away from Storm Cat, I barely drew for myself. The little art I did make was mostly for other people as gifts, without any plans to sell it, post it or turn it into something bigger. There was no product listing waiting at the end and no pressure to wonder whether it fit the rest of my work. I could just make something for someone I cared about and be finished when it felt finished.

Somewhere in that process, my art started changing.

It’s still mine. I can see pieces of the way I’ve always drawn in it, but the shapes are different. I’ve been playing more with bold silhouettes, botanical patterns, limited colours and little folk-art details. Animals have leaves growing through their fur and flowers tucked around them. Things are a little less polished in places, a little more organic in others, and I’m increasingly interested in what happens when I let the shapes and lines be slightly imperfect.

I didn’t sit down and decide that I needed a new art style. It just happened.

But at first, that felt a little strange.

Storm Cat already has years of artwork attached to it. If I start making new products, some of them aren’t going to look exactly like the things I made several years ago. Part of me wondered whether I should try to recreate my old style so everything would match.

Then I realized how silly that would be.

Of course my art changed.

I changed.

✧ This Is a Recurring Theme

My life over the last few years has involved an almost comical amount of adapting.

There have been big changes and small ones, changes I deliberately chose and others I would have happily declined if anyone had bothered to give me a little checkbox. I’ve lost things and people I loved. I’ve moved across the country and started building a life somewhere completely different. I’ve watched plans change shape, started projects that didn’t become what I expected, struggled badly with my mental health and had long stretches where simply keeping up with ordinary life took more out of me than I wanted to admit.

Not all of those experiences secretly contained a wonderful lesson.

I don’t particularly believe that every difficult thing happens because we’re supposed to grow from it. Some things are unfair. Some hurt. Some leave you scrambling to adjust to circumstances you never asked for, and occasionally the appropriate retrospective assessment really is just, well, that sucked.

But change doesn’t particularly care whether we requested it.

Eventually, you have to decide what you’re going to do with the life that’s actually in front of you.

I’m still learning that part.

For a long time, adapting felt a little too much like admitting defeat. If the original plan didn’t work, I wanted to figure out how to get back to it. If I couldn’t do something the way I had imagined, it was difficult to accept that doing it differently might still count.

I’m starting to see adaptation less as abandoning the original plan and more as responding to what is actually here.

Nature is very good at this.

A tree growing around an obstacle doesn’t spend the rest of its life wishing the rock would move. Plants lean toward available light. Animals change their behaviour with the seasons. Landscapes recover from disturbances, but they don’t necessarily return to exactly what they were before.

They keep becoming.

I’m trying to get better at that too.

✧ Making Things Where I Am Now

Coming back to Storm Cat has made this particularly obvious because I can’t recreate the exact creative life I had before I left. I don’t have the same interests, circumstances, energy or relationship with creativity that I had then. I’m also learning more about myself and why some of the ways I used to work eventually became difficult for me.

Trying to perfectly reconstruct the old version would probably just lead me back into the same problems.

So I’m letting things change.

That’s part of why Eidarwild looks different from the worlds I’ve built before. It’s why I’m approaching worldbuilding with more randomness, play and room for uncertainty. It’s why Storm Cat itself is becoming a broader home for nature, TTRPGs, art, writing and whatever else I find myself curious about rather than forcing everything into one tidy little box.

And apparently, it’s why my animals have started growing leaves.

I’m okay with that.

I actually really like where my art is going. I don’t know whether this is my “new style” or just what my work looks like right now, and I’m not particularly interested in pinning it down yet. I want to keep drawing and see what happens.

Some of my older artwork will stay exactly as it is. New pieces might look noticeably different beside it. There will probably be awkward transitional work somewhere in between, because that’s usually how learning anything works.

I think I’d rather have a body of work that shows I’ve changed than one that proves I was very good at staying the same.

Maybe that’s what coming back really means.

Not returning to where you were, but taking the things that still matter with you and figuring out what they look like in the life you have now.

Storm Cat is still Storm Cat. My art is still my art. I’m still me.

We’re just learning to change shape.