I have had a very busy couple of months. Which is brilliant. A couple of blogs ago I was concerned that my summer of commercial work might be a dry one, but that concern was channelled into finding lots of jobs, and since then I’ve been drenched by a torrential downpour of drawing things for people. Any plans I had to take time to develop my own projects have been pushed to the side by animated tube trains, African folk tales, rainbow worlds and small town adventures. It has been hard work and really tested my ability to manage my time but has also been lots of fun.

Drawing for other people has meant that my own ideas and clumps of imagination have had to spring out in unusual places. When I have been waiting for things or on the phone for long periods or just feeling playful in the gaps between one task and the next, I have scribbled little drawings in the margins of notepads, on scraps of paper or around pre-existing sketches. Some of these drawings are conscious attempts to plan things or work something out but most of them just seem to spill out as absent minded doodles and I’m happy they have a place to go. Each of these pages or scraps of paper becomes like a Petri dish festering with ideas, scribbles mutating into more scribbles. I’ve found I’ve produced a lot of these drawings at writing classes, between writing tasks, and it’s as if the engine of my mind needs to be kept ticking over with drawings between outbursts of words; which has made me think a lot about the relationship between my words and pictures and how I would like to develop that. There’s an interesting collection of ‘idle doodles from famous authors’ here http://www.flavorwire.com/147177/idle-doodles-by-famous-authors

Below are some pages from the sketchpad I make notes in and the notepad I do drawings in.