To those of you visiting the blog it looks like nothing has been going on for some time. In some ways this is true and, in others, nothing could be further from the truth. We are all, at some stage or another victims of things that are beyond our control. Sometimes they are things which require our immediate attention, are complex problems that need solving, or often purely connected to the mundanity of modern life. In this case it has been the latter, the need to go out and earn a meagre living. This unhelpful chunk of freelance work, because I’d rather spend my time at home drawing, has been a bit of a distraction, one of those monsters with lots of problem solving thrown in to leave you drained at the end of every day.

Creative image making has not ground to a halt though, it has merely slowed a bit and this is mainly due to me getting my water colour paints out and having a play. Keeping any colour work and the monochrome stuff going concurrently is quite a challenge as they require you to switch between knowledge centres in your brain all the time and I find that quite tiring. But the colour experiments have been fun so far and I’ll get the results of this fiddling up here as soon as possible.

In the meantime enjoy the latest of my “bikeheads”. These are always quite small and so serve as a great way to warm up or practise a particular technique. Returning to the brushes even after a couple of days exposes some rustiness unless one is a consummate expert, and I am certainly not, so it’s a good way to get back into the swing of things. What is interesting about playing with the paints and inks is that the outcome is still often a surprise, invariably unexpected, both good and bad. The good ones prompt you to commit that small action to memory, putting it in the “do that next time” folder. The bad ones go in the “don’t do that” folder and usually make your eyes bleed. I’ve got one of those to show you next time.