Here’s the latest drawing Steam Machine finished except for ironing, and that may have to wait a while because I procrastinate all ironing terribly, including artworks. I have eight in total lined up so far in this series, each measuring 285x225mm, but I will be taking a break from it now - to get on with works for the Open Eye Gallery Christmas exhibition! 

Called ‘On a Small Scale’, each year in November one of the Open Eye’s beautiful big galleries (it is an elegant Georgian building in Edinburgh’s New Town) is banked on all four walls with A5-size works, tiled tightly together, and it always looks amazing - a colourful mosaic of all the artists works which beckons the viewer in for close inspection. This year, for the first time in its history the exhibition will be launched online. This is to allow social distancing in the gallery where selected works will be on show, but I do find it exciting to think an online presence will give the exhibition a global reach.​

Artists are invited to submit up to four works measuring 148x300mm, but I have already prepared a series of 12 from which I will select four for submission to ‘On a Small Scale’. I generally work in series so it suits me to work this way, leaving me with eight for other exhibitions.

When I collect templates in my diary my interest is simply in revealing shapes. I never set out to drawing anything specific; however, as I work ideas suggest themselves which influence the progress of more detailed drawings. Here are six from this week, reading from left to right:

1.  Cactus garden
2.  Map of a park
3.  Morning sunshine surprise
4.  Satellite and space station
5.  Elton John's piano
6.  Map of a village with pond

I used Prismacolor Premier pencils in these drawings. Coloured pencils are not a medium I have really used before, but these are great for this work being surprisingly soft and luminous on Japanese tissue, and I am becoming a fan.
​Incidentally, I am coming to the end of my supply of Kozu Shi paper, which is no longer being made. I think I already have a replacement lined up, though: Lawrence Art Supplies stock a very good Imitation Japanese which I discovered a few years ago and kept in mind (I hope that's still in production!)

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

I am a shape collector! Monday's was a template of chemistry flasks, and Tuesday's came out resembling a coffee machine.
This week's six, and six great things this week …

1  We had chatty cocktail hours every evening with our dear friend, visiting from Germany…
2  … and he gave me his old iPhone! A coveted tool - I’m using it just for the camera, which is excellent
3 Got laundry dried outside on the washing line two days in a row, so satisfying to be out in the fresh air
4 The new moon passed without drama this week. I love the fact it is a daytime moon when it is in its new phase - still there in the sky looking at us, we just can’t see it
5 Burns night: we had haggis recently, so we chose sausages this year to go with our neeps and tatties, and it was delicious. One of my favourite lines in the world is from his poem Sweet Afton: “Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den”, so evocative
6 After Burns night the days really start lengthening:
Sunrise 8:20am, Sunset 4:32pm
compared to the darkest days just after the winter solstice:
Sunrise 8.45, Sunset 4:42pm
- a whole 35 minutes extra daylight, getting more and more every day

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

This week's 6 template drawings using my Dad's old templates, and 6 great things about this week:

1. My lovely bestie flew in from Germany, we have had some great chatty drinks in the evenings. He's not getting any shorter, he seems to be about 6ft 7 these days! (I could be the shrinking one, of course).
2. Back to Binky illustration work on an ongoing project which I am determined to have finished by Easter at the latest. It's a children's book which is top secret until it has been released.
3. The sun is now rising earlier every day - easier to get out of bed!
4. Working page layouts in BookWright, I love that kind of work. It brings out the old graphic designer in me.
5. Stunning frosty mornings with bright sunshine.
6. I am really enjoying collecting templates in my diary, discovering invisible forms. 

Thanks for visiting, see you next week!

This time last year I began to play with the idea of using templates in my drawings. I had inherited a lot of technical templates after my Dad passed away in 2017, some of which he made himself. He was a leading draughtsman and naval architect, and no doubt would find a great deal of humour in the sense I try to make of his tools. I find the forms fascinating and like the idea of using them in ways they were not deigned to be used. I want to incorporate them into my work combined with unreadable text and make them into plans nobody can build, and allow them to convey a sense of joyous unknown logic. The idea of working with cut spaces, or missing forms, is appealing to me. I used a few templates in my Confused Flags recently, and look forward to taking the idea further in 2020.

This Christmas has provided rich pickings for new forms: the image on the right is the remains of a miniature build-a-car car kit after the car parts had been pressed out. To the left, a notebook containing early template experiments I made a year ago, The notebook itself is an interesting Duplicate Manifold Book, supplied by the government for Public Service (in the 1960s by the looks of it), also found amongst Dad's possessions.