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My daughter will be three tomorrow, and motherly affection overcame a lack of ability in the baking skillset. I found that food-colouring behaves much like watercolours, and that icing, even lumpy icing, is a very forgiving medium. Fortunately, she will be three, so her aesthetic judgement is not yet fully developed. I have a year to get a little bit better.

Apologies to any of you who has noticed the radio silence on Draw Anyway of late. I have made the decision to stop posting for a while: life is always hectic, and I feel that other things must take priority, at least for a while. However, the 208 posts made daily over the nine months from late April to December last year will remain here for the time being, and I hope will be useful to some.

As a matter of housekeeping, I intend to switch off commenting in the next few days, as the incoming spam far exceeds genuine comments; if you feel moved to comment, please feel free to do so via the Contact page and I will add your comment to the appropriate post.

If you would like to, please keep Draw Anyway on your feeds or links; I may revive it one day and it would be nice to think there are people waiting to read. In the meantime, thanks to everyone who read, commented, and especially drew.

Myf

A very happy Christmas to all Draw Anyway readers everywhere. Thanks for your continued support. I hope you are scribbling away on new sketchbooks that Santa brought you - in between breaks for festive mince pies and chocolates, that is. I look forward to seeing your holiday images soon!

Disclaimer: I am away from my computer for a few days over Christmas - normal service will be resumed soon. Meanwhile first-time commenters and comments with links in will not publish out until I have a chance to release them. Thanks for your patience.

I’m away for Christmas, and somehow in the complicated rules of Draw Anyway, that means you get an extra link this week. Don’t ask me, I just work here.

Erm, so, what you see above is the work of Randy Plowman, an artist who has contracted with himself to make a small collage every day and put it up for sale. Judging by the number of ’sold’ signs next to each day’s work, he’s doing well from it, too, which is the best kind of inspiring. Plus, longterm Draw Anyway fans will know I’m a big fan of collage.

Visit A Collage A Day here.

Disclaimer: I’m away from my computer for Christmas, so unable to moderate comments. If you are commenting for the first time, your comment will not show up until I have come home, unpacked, fed the cats, put the baby on the potty, and switched the computer on. But I will still be glad to read it.

Via Swiss Miss (again; she’s one of my main online sources of design inspiration) comes this incredible work, made by systematically cutting up old books. It just goes to show that you can make arresting artworks out of all sorts of materials, including those you’d find at car boot sales or charity shops. Find more images at the Aron Packer Gallery, the Haydee Rovirosa Gallery, and this blog post at Centripetal Notion, where debate rages about whether books should be treated this way. Personally I don’t know, but I enjoyed the comment: Amazing work. But why, oh why, use the beloved Second Edition of Webster’s? Why not the exceedingly crappy Third? I’d cut it up any time.

Apologies: it may be too late to pass this information on, but I think that I finally stumbled upon the perfect formula for making Christmas cards with two-year-and-eleven-month-olds. We’ve tried a variety of techniques over the past few weeks, and it’s been hard to strike a balance between the cards she had fun making, and the ones I’d be happy to send out.

Finally, we’ve cracked it, and, if you’re as disorganised as I am (almost certainly due to the presence of the afore-mentioned two-years-and-eleven-month-old), you might just be able to benefit from the formula I’m about to share.

Yes, the last posting date has passed, but there are still the cards to hand out to friends and family in person. Or the cards you might make next year. After all, I’m guessing that Tabitha, age three and eleven months, will have reached almost grand master perfection by then.

OK, here’s the method:

1. Cut out a roughly Christmas tree shape, ie a triangle (with trunk if you are feeling ambitious), out of green wrapping paper or any other vaguely green paper you have. Glue this onto your card.
2. Cut several different sized circles from a magazine or wrapping paper to act as your baubles. Let your child place and glue these. A solid glue stick will minimise the mess.
3. If your child can wield scissors, let them cut out a few squares to be parcels under the tree. if not, do it yourself but let him ‘decorate’ them with pens.
4. Raid your recent stash of C-Beebies (or the like) comics for stickers that might be added (that’s where the littler stars came from).
5. Put a cut-out star or a star sticker at the top of the tree.
6. We had some alphabet stickers so I put the initials of the family this card’s going to on the parcels.
7. That’s it - and a good thing too because your child is now tipping glue down the back of the sofa/sticking glitter to the cat/using your envelopes as handkerchiefs.

I like the result and we both had fun making it - and you can’t get much better than that.

So, I picked up the toddler from nursery tonight and we were at home making paper chains just before bathtime, and my husband’s talking about the Christmas party at nursery tomorrow. “Do you want to wear your Santa outfit or your bee costume?’ he asks, innocently.
“No, Daddy! I want to wear a SNOWFLAKE costume”.

Uh. Right.

I’m all ready to say ‘no way’ until I remember that we had something delivered in a large cardboard envelope last week. Maybe, just maybe, if I apply the Draw Anyway approach to costume making - that is, dive in without worrying too much about the end result. Lots of cutting and some painting with acrylic later, we have a costume. A costume that won’t be very comfortable for long, but, hey, I met the brief.

The moral of the story is that sometimes it’s good to hoard cardboard and paint. And I know that this isn’t strictly a drawing post, but I really only have time for one artistic project in an evening. Having said that, I have her birthday party invitations to get cracking on…

In a recent post, I expounded on one very good reason for drawing, but it occurs to me that I haven’t fully explored the many and varied reasons why people put pen to paper.

As with most things in life, I’d expect that most people who draw regularly have not just one clear reason, but a conglomeration of many. Given that Draw Anyway is based on the idea that its readers often don’t have time to draw, or have lapsed from regular drawing, it might be helpful to re-examine some of those reasons and see if they give us new inspiration. Here is a random list of all the reasons I can think of why I draw. Would you do me the favour of replying with yours? And perhaps the next post should be reasons why we don’t draw.

1. Because I have a Draw Anyway post to illustrate
2. Because I need to pass the time, in a meeting or on a train
3. Because when a picture comes right, it gives me a feeling of pride that few other activities in my life do
4. Because one day, I’d love to make a living from drawing
5. Because practising makes you better
6. Because sometimes (although this has not happened for a while) people are genuinely impressed by my pictures
7. Because it’s great, when I have the time, to be able to draw my own birthday cards or gift pictures
8. Because it’s something that my daughter and I both enjoy doing equally
9. Because it’s a way I can show my husband I care for him, putting time and effort into, say, an anniversary card rather than picking one out in the shop
10. Because I’ve seen something that I either couldn’t or didn’t want to photograph, and I want to express it visually.

Now you!

On Friday, I mentioned that I’d visited some local Open Studios. As well as the sketchbooks, I was also overjoyed to find some talented ceramicists selling tiles, including seconds and odd bits and bobs. For a while now, I’ve been planning to tile one portion of our kitchen with non-matching tiles, inspired by a photo in a magazine I saw in a doctor’s waiting room and was never able to track down again. Despite trawling the internet and keeping my eyes open at car boot sales, I have been unable to find many one-off tiles, excepting a few rather expensive wins from eBay. Here, finally, was my answer. Yes, sometimes the internet just doesn’t give you what you want: you have to do the footwork and get out into the real world.

In celebration of my new collection of tiles, let me inspire you with the British mosaic site The Joy of Shards. Funny, for a site showcasing so many visually appealing pieces, the design is hellish. But if it’s knowledge and inspiration you’re after, this is a great place to start: instructions, galleries, and a history of the form. Plus, what sold it to me, the mosaic catdoor shown above.

Wouldn’t your cat like a mosaic door?

Colleague and I slipped out of the office this lunch time to visit an Open Studio event. I was extremely surprised to find that a company whose products I’ve seen in all the glossy magazines is actually local to my home town of Brighton - and their studio was just down the road. Sukie make a very distinctive kind of product. Their books are beautiful: travel journals with pockets to put your treasures in; notebooks with a big picture of a leaf on every page; children’s journals with free stickers included.

I was even more surprised when I saw the prices they were selling old stock at. No wonder people were queuing up and leaving with their arms absolutely full. I joined them.

One of my favourite buys was a notebook of recycled paper, each page featuring random sections of numbers. I’ve written many times before about finding new ways to surprise yourself in drawing, to shake yourself out of ruts. One fine way to do this is to see where shapes on the page lead you, be that a picture in a magazine that you’re doodling over, or coffee stains on your office print-out. These pale numbers are just perfect for that, too - odd curves and lines may find you turning your pen to new directions.

This piece of paper fluttered out when I opened up my box of pastels to draw a quick sketch for Monday’s post on drawing with straight lines. It’s just a bit of tracing paper that’s there to prevent the lid of the box getting marked, I assume, but I really like the effect of all the different colours.

However, I want your advice. How would you use this? In a collage, as the background for a drawing, as a Photoshop brush?