Sitting in a cafe, looking out on a grey rainy day, I noticed with interest the dull greyness was punctuated by red-orange at every point. Table napkins, awning, car, balconies. Street lamp, lady’s hair and scarf, traffic sign.

How very curious.

Blind contour drawing over and over within confined boundaries of an oddly angled face.

Released from any need for likeness. Always a good thing for the sketchbook.

Back to paint. Still messing with stuff that’s been up on the walls for months. I’m away for a few days now, but I always seem to get an urge to paint when I don’t have access to the studio.

Sod’s law.

Just how hard can it be to pull one decent print from a lino cut I’m happy with?

Hours, is the answer. Hours, when the printer to print my chine collé tissue starts playing up and chewing up paper. And the USB lead is too short to reach the printer from the laptop so I have to unplug every time I get up to print afresh.

Anyway, print finally there.

It’s no excuse but I can’t begin to explain how hard it is to do any work when additional children appear on the horizon.

It was an achievement to open the sketchbook today.

Spent a delightful morning and afternoon listening to young pianists performing in the school piano competition, followed by a splendid recital of Schubert, Chopin and Listz by the adjudicator, Jonathan Middleton who apart from performing beautifully was a really nice guy and gave sensitive and thoughtful yet well-considered feedback to the competitors…

Bottom line: today was a music day not a studio day, so I ended up playing with thumbnail sketches at the very beginning of my deserted hostelries project.

I love doing thumbnails. It hardly counts as risk-taking: there’s not much less risky than a thumbnail, but more important is the fact the sketchbook came out at all.

Back on track. Focussed, experimenting, messing with different papers and colours to decide how finally I’m going to do this print which after the mono printing sessions has finally become a linocut.

I may actually be ready to run tomorrow. If I can print the chine collé bits I want to use.

Sometimes all you can do is doodle. Sitting in on a piano lesson, I’m supposed to be making notes. I make the notes in my sketch book because it gives me a chance to doodle and mess at the same time.

I feel I should be concentrating on note-taking, but following the contours of a jacket flung on the floor becomes much more absorbing. As do the positions of hands of both pupil and teacher.

Sometimes the fun comes from saying to yourself “Right, as fast as you can, line only, with this biro which is the only tool to hand, draw those [glass] objects”.

And so you do. Probably a couple of minutes’ worth.

Transport, wifi and charging issues conspired to prevent this going out earlier, but that’s all part of daily fail anyway.

I was limited as usual to materials to hand, and I think taking risk is often just a consequence of having to make do. In the ideal world you would use X but in practice all you’ve got is Y and it won’t produce anything like you have in mind but there’s the challenge.

So I was splashing the contents of a water bottle onto soluble graphite pencils on a train, and then decided to draw fellow passengers surreptitiously, which I would have said at other times isn’t outside my comfort zone but now all of a sudden is.

Maybe because I haven’t drawn strangers under the table for a while.