The voyage within

Posted on May 28, 2020 at 12:00 pm. 1 Comment

Starting things is much easier than finishing them. At the beginning of lockdown I made a decision to finish some of the projects I’d begun….but then, like a child who tips the whole toy box upside down instead of playing with one toy at a time, I found more and more things I wanted to do. Ten weeks on and I now have 12 things on my ‘list of things to do during lockdown’ instead of 5.

The trouble is, when you can’t go travelling in the physical world, you have time to make new journeys on the good ship curiosity. Rummaging through notebooks, sketchbooks, websites, books and odd corners of my brain there are half formed ideas and roads to travel that offer delightful detours from whatever road I’m on. Some of these detours (most of them!) lead nowhere but that doesn’t matter. They all take you somewhere new, however briefly.

I’ve nearly finished my book on drawing, but started two others. I’ve signed on for two online courses to learn more creative skills, dabbled in fabric design, had a bit of a sort out in the studio, discovered things I thought I’d lost, forgotten things I meant to remember.

You can travel far without leaving home.

Meanwhile the days slide by as quietly as the tide flows past my door. I’m truly grateful to ‘live where I love’. It’s a pleasure that’s been a long time coming, all the more so as it was a time of crisis and near homelessness that washed me up on the banks of the river. Failure has much to offer in the way of unexpected bonuses!

Enough rambling – here’s the next free download from ‘One Line at a Time’, which is progressing well in spite of all distractions as I promised lovely publisher (Julia Jones at Golden Duck) that I’d get the first draft ready by the end of May so that we can have the books available later in the summer.

This time I thought you might like a break from all those technical exercises and have a chapter which is more playful, taking drawing beyond copying what we see.

If you need a few more creative prompts, I’ve added a few more short videos to my youtube channel – the latest one is about sketchbooks:

Wishing you fair winds on your own creative voyage! Let me know how you get on.