First flowers on my tomatoes have more hair on them than on the top of my head. Perhaps I should take to drinking “Miracle Grow”, but then it might affect the hair I have elsewhere like on my chin which grows faster than my cucumbers, which appear from seemingly nowhere to surround me. At least that was my experience last year, the young plants I have this year look ready to flower but given a couple of weeks they will be hanging around all over the place.

I’ve had another burst of drawing. Sheds again. In the hope of diminishing my collection of paper I’ve offered the originals here and there to the shed owners and the one featured here is Steve’s shed. He was only slightly disappointed that I’d not drawn his earlier, but when he gave me a load of very healthy young plants the other day, I offered to draw his shed, and he thought that was a good deal and so did I.

I’ve started a slightly different approach to these drawings. In the past I’ve stuck to my comfort zone of line drawing first. Line drawings were my living for many years so I’m easy with them. I’m not particularly at home with colour. Poor colour vision does not help but it’s really more to do with knowing how to apply it. My colour cartoon work always used to be ‘coloured in’ with magic markers, but they are no longer flavour of anyone’s month. Added to that I never really liked doing the colour work.

Now I’ve come to soft pastels. I used them with markers in the old days to heighten colour here and there or to knock back areas to make them background. I used just them more recently on a couple of children’s books and almost disappeared in a cloud of chalky dust. When it had settled, the results were good enough for me and printed up quite well. It involves a lot of rubbing of fingers, not in anticipation, but in blending and moving colours around. I’m on my third children’s book as I write this and have recently started the colouring of this one. I suffered CB for some months with this ( colourers block ) sometimes more accurately described as CBA : “can’t be arsed”. I’m over that now and the book looks like it might get done.

However, I’ve been distracted by landscapes and drawings of sheds and over the last few days have dipped into drawing sheds yet again. Might that be called “Shedditus”? So as usual, I’ve started another job when I’ve not finished the previous one. And with these new drawings I’ve gone knee deep in dust from the start. Here’s how they are progressing:

…and then the smoothing of the colours here and there, so same drawing but with coloured fingers:

I’ve got more work to do on this, mainly on the tree which dominate these two lovely sheds. I might post that later, when I’ve done it or ruined the whole thing.

Incidentally the shed on the left in this drawing was all made from found waste wood and it has to be one of the finest buildings on the plot. Below is stage 3, and I’m thinking that I may have overcooked it a little. It does at least illustrate how this on tree dominates these two fine sheds, but something is not quite right, I’ll go and feed the hairy toms and have a think about it.