On LOTS

Wasting paper semi-constructively

It’s November and, for the first time in months, I have a bit of time to myself. I’ve finished illustrating a chapter book, I’ve done all my teaching preparations, handed in an album cover for Tom Rosenthal and done all the bookshop events and podcast recordings I was scheduled to do this Autumn. So now…I’m more or less free till the end of the year.

I’m still going to the studio of course (without that routine I am liable to go full-sofa-slug for most of the winter) but I have less structure, fewer deadlines, a bit of brain-space. Which, of course, invariably means I completely freeze up, creatively.

This is fine, of course its fine. Important to have a break etc etc. All the usual wellbeing stuff that is very, very important and totally boring to write/read about. So I’ll spare you all that and jump on to the next bit. Once you’ve given yourself a breather…how do you, or how do I, get back into it?

Well. If you’re me the answer is ‘LOTS’.

Lots of tiny paintings

I love doing lots of one thing. It’s such an easy trick and, so far, it never fails. Lots of one thing is pleasing. It triggers delight in us to be faced with multiples, to wonder which is our favourite, to group things, to arrange them.

Postage stamp collages

And as a drawing or painting activity it allows you to explore variables in colour or texture or pattern without having to expend too much brain energy on coming up with a new subject matter. Or it means you can explore one technique over and over using the same exact approach to make a variety of pictures. By the end you find you’ve worked out some kind of balance (ie this much ink plus this much coloured pencil produces the outcome I like best).

My cardboard friends.

A couple of years ago a moment of madness saw me making a gang of cardboard ‘friends’ (above). They served no purpose at all but were an absolute joy to make. I would have spent days and days doing this had I the space to leave them all to dry.

Blue and orange paintings.

I don’t even remember doing these blue and orange paintings on bits of board. But clearly I did them.

At the end of last week I was think a lot about wintery roads. I’d been at home visiting my parents, which is basically the only time I’m ever in a car and I found the experience of driving up the A38 at night deeply nostalgic. It was still in my head when I got back to the studio and so I ploughed through some very quick ink paintings to exorcise the idea. Nothing resolved. Nothing even that interesting. But there’s something in the process of doing the same image over and over, it helps you work out what’s interesting to you about that subject, I suppose.

Hopefully, by next week, I’ll have settled back into my own thoughts enough that I won’t have to trick myself into drawing. But for now, this is a fun way of easing myself in.

More soon….

Thanks for sticking with me, everyone. x