Before you go out to celebrate the New Year be sure to have a good wash.
Dress up for once, it’ll do you good.
Have a drink, but in moderation.
Enjoy the music…
and the dancing. But…
…don’t over do it…
…or you may wake up a different shape than the night before…and you just might lose your colour vision.
Have you ever wondered how picture book characters relax after a stressful storytelling day running up and down, roundabout and through all those pages?
It started this morning with a familiar distraction on the way home from school.
At my drawing desk I switched things on. While waiting for everything to go ping…
I forgot something at the house so I popped out (it’s a jungle out there). No, I don’t draw when I walk.
Mid morning cuppa, kettle on. While waiting, a brief glimpse of the sun draws me to the window and a reminder where a little of the influence for this sketch has probably come from…
Too close to finishing to stop so I ignore the phone and push on…
And finally, a close up of the finished sketch…
I often think that developing ideas is a little like doing a jigsaw: I find little single ideas and try to piece them together to build a bigger picture.
I drew this in my sketchbook a while back. I have a habit of re-visiting familiar themes regularly so I decided to simply doodle some of them in boxes and place them randomly on a single page. Like dominoes I added more and more boxes and got half way through with ‘familiar’ ideas. This left me with empty boxes that I then filled with doodles inspired by what I had already done.
This page looks like it means something but actually it doesn’t! Well, it didn’t when I first finished but it has since kick-started ideas that have developed into character and story possibilities.