This video was filmed today at Camden Market in London, where I’ve been doing The Camden Market Free Art Man free art giveaway for about two years now. Original paintings given away en masse to passers by willing to do a one minute interview.

Now I’ve finally decided the days and times I can commit to doing The Camden Market Free Art Man this summer, I need to make signage advertising this. Until November, when I plan to leave the UK for South East Asia for a few months, I’ll be at Camden every Saturday and Sunday 12-3pm, unless rain or sickness stop me. I also need to make some repairs to existing signage and paint some more flags as people are starting to take them.

The trip to South East Asia was initially going to be spent entirely in Thailand with my girlfriend Aon and her family in rural Isaan, but it seems visa conditions will be changing that will only give me 30 days instead of the 60 days it was last year. So the plan now is to spend a month in Thailand, then Aon and I go to Vietnam for a month or two before returning to the UK together.

Recently, I’ve been chopping these Camden videos up into vertical shorts for YouTube. The ones I’ve done so far took too long to make, but I’ve just started learning AI so will hopefully have today’s done a lot quicker. A lot of people took paintings today without doing interviews. I don’t mind as I got nearly an hours worth anyway, and it’s not immediately clear that people are expected to do a YouTube interview, so don’t suspect people are doing anything wrong on purpose. But it means I need a lot more Blond Cards than I currently have in storage. Blond Cards are, by a country mile, the most popular artworks I’ve taken to Camden so far. I’d guess 30-40 went out today. 80 a week, 320 a month, six months till November, around 2000 needed for 2026. If I’d known about Blond Cards last year, I could have made a load last winter in Thailand, but didn’t so spent most of the Thailand time making Heckel’s Horse Jr paintings nobody wants.

I used to edit the Camden videos properly, but now just drag the raw files into my video editor, add the annotations and theme tune, then upload to YouTube without even watching it through. To compensate for this, I’m taking a bit more care to film things in the order they’ll work best in, and making a mental note if something happens that I think will need to be edited out. Making all these time saving changes to my workflow helps but soon gets eaten up by new tasks I didn’t see coming. All the time I save tonight, not video editing is gone working on new Blond Cards. Tomorrow, I’ll be at Billy’s studio meaning 5 hours sat on buses and trains learning AI.

Last year I thought this year will have all the background prep work done, meaning more time painting, making music and doing The Camden Market Free Art Man at least 3 days a week. The prep work was what I thought I was doing in Thailand, but wasn’t. I expect this summer and autumn will be spent figuring out how to do Camden, setting up AI agents, and coming back to the UK in early 2027 with suitcases full of mostly Blond Card paintings. Summer 2027 will hopefully be what I thought summer 2026 was going to be this time last year… FREE ART FREES ART properly moving.