People who might have ideas will understand this. When I worked at the print company if you sat back and sucked your pencil thinking, it was seen as non productive time.They were manufacturing so perhaps it was, but time spent sucking the pencil in the creative world may well be considered working quite hard.

I’ve been sucking the pencil for a while about what to do with a load of landscape drawings. After a recent foray into colour for a children’s book where I applied colour to the drawings with pastel, a medium I used to use just a little when the bulk of my colour work was done in magic marker. I gave away my markers some years ago and determined to just do black and white work. Then I started to work in digital colour. Working hard to make the drawings look like they had not been over digitised. All a bit of a work around really, and involving staring for far too long at a screen.

The landscape work was a leap away from the cartoon work, and non of it done on a screen. Big drawings.It brought back that relaxed feeling that comes with drawing on paper. No wonder art is seen as therapy, and I’ve been in art therapy for years.

So I’ve been sucking that pencil and thinking exactly how will I colour these drawings. Leap in there and just do it, came the answer to myself. My intention is also to do some colour versions from scratch, and even try doing some in situ with a little stool and a sketchbook, but for the time being I’m attacking the black and white drawings.

Then they are pinned to my studio office wall board so that I can look at them and suck the pencil again, to see what I might do next to them. More colour? Less? We’ll see.

Just hoping that when finished, they don’t suck!