A reflective weekend. In pursuit of Slowness. 24 hours away from all online activity, allowing focussed concentrated reading and note making on real paper in real books. In this way, the sketchbook journal resumes its status as a focus for all ideas development in my life. This is how it should be. The book I can’t leave home without. The reflection of me and who I am. And it’s freezing cold everywhere today and I can’t get warm even close up to the fire. So I use some nasty

The best type of glorious failure today. I have been playing around with surfaces for making shadow puppets, and had read that Ivory Board (which is neither ivory nor board, being simply a bright white smooth cardstock) of a certain weight would take on a nice translucency once oiled out after painting with watercolour. So all I wanted to do was throw some watercolour onto the surface in preparation for oiling, and since I had a figure in mind, the daubings took on a figurati

The return from holiday today. The hassle of travel ought to provide a feast of sketchbook opportunities but actually the constant feel of being under time pressure is a huge disincentive to pulling out a pen. This is therefore prime challenge time: no desire to try anything which I won’t have time to complete and no time anyway. So I decide to just draw whatever is in front of me for seconds at a time. Line only. A misdelivery of half the family to the wrong terminal by the

I am fearful of cliche in art even though it amuses me in writing. So today peering at a coral reef through the windows of an underwater boat and at tropical fish through the display windows of an aquarium, I was reluctant to pick up the brush because I felt overwhelmed by potential cliche. In the end, after some trite watercolours and too much blind contour drawing, I painted something inspired by the nocturnal Jellyfish chamber. I think it has possibilities. #challenge #Fa

This is already an interesting journey with gradually evolving limitations and premises. I need to clarify that it’s more about accepting failure as a concomitant part of risk and challenge, rather than striving to fail as such. But having said that, embracing failure is an important part of the process, and the interesting bit for me is taking the risk element and seeing what happens when I do something I don’t really want to do work-wise. When I don’t want to do something,

I couldn’t resist it. New year, new project. Driven by the one thing I regularly do not do enough of despite knowing that it is massively important for successful creativity. Confronting failure head on. Sketchbooks and journals are usually private; unpressured by threat of exposure, the artist is free to experiment and build up a catalogue of glorious failure as a platform to learning and progress. Sketchbooks are frequently only revealed after sanitising and cleaning. What