For Christmas last year, my Dad gave me an A6 Fabriano notebook – one of the ones with the red “Venice” pattern on the cover. I tried to carry it around as much as possible and do some drawing in it everywhere I went – this didn’t always work out, but I found it had really great paper. Not only was it nice to draw on, but it could also deal with watercolour.

This is one of my last pages in it, with some sketches from Hitchin, and from a walk in the fields near my hometown. Just after I stopped and painted those two boxes, I came across a dead rabbit by the side of the path and screamed like a little girl. After calming down, I carried on walking, and found a birdwatcher just around the corner from me. We studiously ignored each other.

News! I’ve been interviewed over at the Circus of Illustration blog, which features artists from the Bedfordshire area. You can read about my special inspiration hat here.

I also managed to get over to Tulse Hill in London to visit the artist Rosaelie Schewelkier, who runs the Emely Space. We had a nice chat about being an artist in London, which convinced me that a) I am doing the right stuff for me, and b) I don’t have anywhere near the amount of energy it would take to move out and live somewhere that’s not Bedfordshire.

This was proved when I got home and collapsed for a few days. Getting lost on the way to Tulse Hill was exhausting!

I’ve wanted to post this image online for a while, but I kept hoping I’d do a better version of it. This is my third attempt, and I realised that I just don’t have the willpower to give it a fourth attempt right now; I’ve got the paper all set up and ready to go, but instead I’ve been working on trees. This piece was also done on some slightly-larger-than-my-scanner paper, which is why there’s a sort of grey fringing around the edges.

A few weeks ago I was invited over to Liverpool by Gary and Lena, who run The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home. I had a residency with them in 2008, just before I started my Masters course, and I always felt horribly guilty that I’d never sent them anything. After all, it was a paid residency – shouldn’t they get something for their money?

To assuage my guilt, I had sent them a few postcards in the mail in 2010 and ’11. I was quite surprised, however, when they got in touch and asked me to come and do some watercolours of their local area, but I grabbed the chance to get out of Bedfordshire. We agreed that I’d stay in their house whilst they were away over Easter, and I spent about two and a half weeks in the city.

I never completed that Masters course in 2008 because I got really sick. I’m mostly better now, but I live with my folks in Bedfordshire because I’m not entirely better, so going to Liverpool was a chance to measure how recovered I was. The answer? Not as much as I like to think!

At the minute, I’m working on collating the drawings I did in Liverpool into some form of document – more than a blog post, perhaps a ‘zine – that I can distribute, somehow. I’m interested in getting it printed as a real document, so if you have any tips on printing, please let me know.

I just finished this A3-sized watercolour yesterday, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. I do have a few problems though – for starters, I don’t have anywhere to put it!

I’m thinking about doing a few more of these, of other cities that I haven’t been to. It seems weird to just do one, and then say “oh yeah, that worked really well!”, and then stop. If I do, I might put up a bit more about the process that is involved – it’s quite long, and takes a few days.

I have been in bed for a good portion of the week, laid up with a terrible cold. Therefore, I’ve posted my comic about the apocalyptic consequences of cloning Sherlock actor Benedict Cumberbatch, rather than write smart things.

Seriously, I was totally out-of-action this week. I even forgot the word “pentangle” for about five minutes. How embarrassing.

Edit: There are some spelling errers and mistake grammar in the piece above. This is actually a good thing; it shows how doing multiple revisions of the work helps you catch those annoying glitches!

My early morning ritual is, shamefully, waking up and reading the internet on my phone, whilst still snuggled in my duvet.

They looked grey in the shop.

AN Magazine is a trade publication for artists. It’s written in a sort of ultra-academic art language, which I don’t like. Or, I should say, it’s liminal properties disturb my conceptions of appropriate language.

And that was my day! Well, most of it. I also did some drawing in front of the TV watching the Andy Kaufman biopic, “Man on the Moon”, which I enjoyed.

What I learnt from doing this was that I need to get way better at hands, and that giving over my creativity to an externally set goal was quite useful. I enjoyed the challenge of trying to think about my day, and make it something that worked in a comic, and I wasn’t afraid to fail at this task. That’s why this post is scrappy and imperfect; I’m not good at making comics, and I’m not perfect at drawing people, but these sorts of externalised creative deadlines let you get over your limitations.

The Victoria and Albert Museum once ran a series of adverts, proclaiming that it was an “ace caff (sic) with quite a nice museum attached“. Since then, it’s become a world-class museum with a really motherfucking swanky café attached.

My plan was that I would hang out during the day, doing some figure studies in the V&A’s sculpture gallery, and then head over to the Science Museum’s “Lates” night in the early evening to catch a lecture. After doing a few pages of chalk studies in my slightly-too-large to scan notebook (doh!) I felt the first pangs of hunger set in. This was bad news, as the V&A café is not only super-expensive and super-swanky, but also not a huge amount of fun to sit in – it’s loud, dim, and a little on the cold side.

However, I managed to get a sandwich and a coffee for under a tenner, and then realised that it was the only place in the museum that I could do a watercolour painting – drawing rules say that only dry media is to be used in the galleries. So in between throwing the sandwich into my mouth, I did a short watercolour of the cafés’ pianist.

Afterwards, I went back to doing some chalk studies. My Edinburgh-based friend Cassandra Harrison had sent the chalk to me, and I urge you to check out her blog to read about her ongoing position as a working artist. I was using them to get a handle on the figure, copying the marble sculpture, and had a really great time – I’ll probably go back next week, with a packed lunch.

Almost immediately, I ran into a problem. The cops tried to blow up my luggage.

A man can’t even take a whizz on a train without the state getting up in his grill. Damn these post-terrorist times. Thankfully, the rest of the train journey was less eventful. In fact, it was so uneventful that I decided to do some watercolours out of the window, after drawing a dog and my waterbottle.

Painting on the train was ace, and I really enjoyed it. Sadly, it was the most productive – in terms of work I made – during my trip. As soon as I got off the train I was involved in the process of picking up my stuff and working out what to do with it.

I thought I would draw all the boxes from storage, but dealing with it was so exhausting – and so distracting – that it was hard to keep it together. Just waking up to the thought of all my boxes of crap was enough to wipe me out on Tuesday, and I spent the morning in bed under a giant fluffy duvet.

On Wednesday I picked myself up and went into town to see some friends. I took an early bus into the city centre so I could do some drawing, and this was pretty much the only time I managed to do so in the city. Lesson learned: if you want to do drawing, you have to make time for it. I particularly wanted to draw the train station, but those builders grabbed the good seats so they could smoke. I ended up surrounded by a bunch of teenagers.

(Oh, and by the way, excuse my fingers – this sketchbook’s uneven spine doesn’t make for good scanning. It does have lovely paper though, which makes it quite useful for on-the-go sketching.)

I managed a few quick watercolours before it was time for my lunch date, and then I barely managed to scribble anything on Thursday. I was exhausted by the prospect of throwing away, or giving away, pretty much a decade’s worth of stuff. Most of that stuff was books that I had built up, thinking they were the backbone of my “adult” possessions, but were just another lump of stuff that ended up needing to be disposed of.

I’m trying to write a short essay about it, but my thoughts are complicated by the reasons why I had to throw all that stuff away. Bad relationships, serious illnesses, and confused education choices made my life a lot more interesting than it normally is. The act of actually getting rid of the stuff was quite nice – a chance to see old friends, catch up, and give them presents. The act of sorting it out in some literary form is really tough, and I worry I’ve traded a talent with words for a talent with images…

My visit was generally fun, and it reinforced my urge to make more drawings, to make better drawings. But it also made me want to communicate better with those drawings, because otherwise, what’s the point?

It’s that special time of year again, where no matter if you’re a follower of Tarvu or you have been touched by his noodly appendage, you suddenly find yourself needing to do a bunch of stuff involving buying cards and going to parties.

This is a time of year where it is just hard to get things done. It’s dark and cold, and the excitement of a new year is just around the corner. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been finding it difficult to apply my butt to the seat and get down to work recently! Whatever the reason for my procrastination, it has meant that this is the first year I’ve been on top of my christmas card list. Huzzah!

The other thing about this time of year is that you have to go out to parties and meet people. You might think that you can stay in and get more work done, but you’ll probably end up eating cake in front of the TV and feeling miserable. I’m probably speaking from personal experience here, but I know I’m not alone in dragging myself out only to have an unexpectedly nice time.

My friend Mike runs a ‘zine called “Opinionated Geordie Monsters”, where each page is a hand-drawn monster reviewing a gig. If you’ve seen a gig and fancy sending in a page, here’s the details.

I sent in the above picture as an opinionated Geordie mathematician. You’ll have to track down down a copy of the ‘zine to find out what he’s saying.