When I explain how crazily my parents keep hold of things, people often say “oh, that sounds just like my grandparent before they went really crazy”. For instance, I recently opened a suitcase to find a collection of polythene document wallets, like you would put in a folder. These things are worthless, the sort of plastic product you can buy in hundreds for a pound. And this was a suitcase full of them. Mainly, the ones that had been screwed up and creased during use.

It’s not like they only keep broken, worthless things, mind. It’s just that they keep deciding to add new things to the collection without throwing the old things out. There’s no process of evaluation that has to happen, a process I learnt when I moved house three times in one year without a car (because, seriously, if you have to carry a thing to a new place, you soon learn how much you care about the thing).

This was one of those days where I really wanted to get out and sketch, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it. Plus, Dr Who was on later (I think it was that episode by Neil Gaiman), so I ended up trying to draw the hedge and the blue sky above it.

Plus, I really wanted to try doing watercolour in my new sketchbook. I kept taking it out but forgetting my watercolour set, which was just massively annoying. I even did one drawing where I added watercolour afterwards, so desperate was I to break the cherry on this watercolour sketchbook. I had been sitting in the open-air cafe at Hitchin town square (the nice one run by the Italian guys, not the big one in the middle) and been sketching all the bits around town, including a tree.

I started off by doing the buildings, which is a classic mistake that I do. I love architecture, so my first response to drawing in towns is to whip out my pen and start on the buildings. Really, I need to work up to them, letting myself get loosened up. I find that once I’ve been drawing for about a solid hour I’m capable of tackling subjects that, otherwise, I’d make a giant hash of.

But I didn’t warm up, so I made a giant hash of my drawings, whilst sitting in public at this cafe full of chatty people. As I finished, one of the other patrons asked me what I was going to do with my sketches. Would I be putting them on canvas?

It was an interesting view as to what people thought when they saw me drawing. The owner of the coffee shop had said to me “Hey, it’s like Covent Garden now, with the sketching!”. I offered to pick his pocket to complete the feel, but he declined. Then there was the lady who walked past and looked at me, dead in the eye, and said the word “sketching”. That was a bit freaky.

I guess these are all things that contributed to me staying in. Sometimes I just want to draw, and not deal with how other people see me when I’m drawing in public.

James Hugonin is an artist who lives in Northumbria, and makes paintings that reflect his surroundings by taking the predominant colour for each day and painting a square in that colour. This is very procedural art, and therefore it lends itself very well to make a computer program that does the same thing.

This would probably annoy the bejesus out of Hugonin. Sadly, this is not my concern, as this is another exercise set my Jamie Allan, my tutor. Obviously, if you’ve seen my last piece of work for him, you might be getting concerned that Jamie is actually running some form of art world Project Mayhem, and that all graduates of the DM course will be changing their name to Bob soon. This is probably not the case.

I am Pete’s complete lack of surprise.

If you’re going to procedurally fake something, why just fake one? Therefore I set the program to stop cranking out fakes at a thousand. The colour’s a bit off, as if Hugonin had suddenly found his Northumbrian idle surrounded by flesh tones, but it holds together. The video ends up being 8.20 long, with two “paintings” every second.