My 'honorary brother', Ian, has been in Venice for a few days. We grew up together in the same street in Scotland and did our spell in London at the same time, but now he lives in Germany so I don't see so much of him (especially these days when nobody sees much of anybody!) but we speak twice a week on the phone. Every day when he was in Venice he sent me photos of his hotel and places he had been, which I am sure unconsciously rubbed off on me because as I was deciding on a title for this one I realised there were references to canals, Renaissance buildings and motifs, the romantically scruffy and slightly broken feel of Venice, misty vague shapes, and I noticed the unreadable writing in a foreign language (asemic text) had a distinctly dangly appearance. Ian had sent me a photo of the most beautiful old Murano glass chandelier (in his bedroom!!!) which made a huge impression on me - I love it so much, I reckon without knowing it the chandelier influenced the delicacy and suspended nature of the lettering.

So, this one is titled Letter From Venice. It will be going off to the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh for inclusion in the annual Christmas Exhibition On a Small Scale along with two other works of A5 dimensions. The exhibition is going to be online for the first time in its history. It was a good move on the Gallery's part  because who knows which Covid alert tier Edinburgh, or any of our cities and towns, will be in next month. If the spread of the virus doesn't slow down it could happen that non-essential businesses will be forced to close their doors again. If that does happen, the show goes on - three cheers for the internet! 

New drawing in progress with a comet, of course, and more unreadable writing. The section at the bottom right (pictured above) looked to me like a strange machine, so I gave it cloud puffs rising up towards the comet. I drew the comet around a splodge of dark red monotype ink which I thought gave it a sultry  Martian look.

The other day I was playing around with a grille composed of Old West lettering again, I placed it over one of my drawings to see how it would look. It does have a feeling of looking outside from within. I was most interested in the shapes created between the letters, coloured around in black to isolate them.

This week I have had a push to get the children's book I am illustrating as Binky McKee well on its way to completion. Part of it was to create alphabets of lettering to make a couple of posters for the story in a Wild West kind of font. I became very interested in the spaces between the letters as I was making them into words. In my spare time I quickly threw together this idea in relation to my interest in asemic text and legibility. It made a fascinating screen reminiscent of mashrabiya design. I placed it over a photo I took of the side of a rusty, bashed up skip (when we were moving house two years ago) and some fascinating shapes revealed themselves. They almost look hewn from stone.

Well, last week I simply forgot to post this. I did the same with my Binky McKee illustration and design blog, I left both posts in drafts and forgot to publish, so I backdated it today. I was most interested in these leftover pieces of cutout template shapes, strewn across a piece of paper - they really do look like a strange calligraphy.

New work in progress: my work room has begun to settle into some kind of order after the house move. I am allowing the drawings a bit more space on the paper than previously, and incorporating messed up things like the little blue rain cloud above, which I drew using carbon paper. I like the fact I can't see what I have drawn until I remove the carbon paper. Surprises keep the work fresh, and there is quite a personality developing in this one.

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

Four revisited altered text drawings I made in 2014 when I was making a lot of work using text which I obliterated and altered to suit. This collage shows 4 details. Reading the image from top left in a clockwise direction, here is what was going through my mind at the time.