30th August

Adding the wash really made this drawing for me: I wasn't too sure about it until that point. I keep coming back to the greys and purples of the ink washes, I like the way they soften a drawing.

Posted: 11.54pm on 30.8.07
Returned: 1.9.07

29th August

Little beaded lines seem to have come up repeatedly in the Diary Project drawings. I don't mean to keep returning to them but I can't seem to help myself.

Posted: 11.45pm on 29.8.07
Returned: 1.9.07

28th August

I had a tough time with this envelope, I'd got the drawing done OK but then struggled horribly with the contents and only just got the envelope posted before the midnight deadline. I had been having a rough week with the project and my energy levels and commitment to the envelopes had been a bit lacking. I'm feeling better about it now, I just occasionally hit a bit of a low point with it.

Posted: 11.58pm on 28.8.07
Returned: 30.8.07

27th August

This envelope was a lot of fun to draw. I drew it lying down in bed. I licked my index finger and pressed it onto the envelope and then drew into the wet oval. I did this over and over, experimenting with the wet ink and the different variations on the simple oval shape. I like that the shapes correspond so neatly to my own body, even though none of the designs are particularly reminiscent of fingerprints.

Posted: 10.29pm on 27.8.07
Returned: 29.8.07

26th August

I described this in my project notebook as a 'broken blue fence' but it could also be a hair ribbon that winds off the page and back round again.

Posted: approx 8.10pm on 26.8.07
Returned: 29.8.07

25th August

I was interested in using the corner shape in this envelope. The outlines are black pen but the coloured sections are grey pencil. I originally thought I would colour the whole sphere but once I got started, I realised that a more random arrangement was more visually interesting to me.

Posted: 11.55pm on 25.8.07
Returned: 29.8.07

24th August

Another red and black envelope, clearly I was in a groove. I always find it hard to get away from red when I'm using colour. It's one of the few colours I regularly add to my mostly monochrome sculptural work.

Posted: 11.43pm on 24.8.07
Returned: 28.8.07

23rd August

Dem bones, dem bones, dem red bones?

Posted: 11.55pm on 23.8.07
Returned: 25.8.07

22nd August

I like the way that other people see things in my drawings that would never have occurred to me.

Rebekka Pierre from Flickr says:
I like this one.. looks sort of like a half eaten apple. or a bunch of feet, or a forest in reflection of itself..

Rebekka, I love your insights - I was aware of the half eaten apple reference when I drew it (although I've got it described in my notebook as a 'triffid mouth', which obviously made sense to me at the time!) but I would never have thought of the feet or the forest reference.

Posted: 11.47pm on 22.8.07
Returned: 25.8.07

21st August

It's interesting to me how changing the colour and orientation of a shape can make so much difference to the way it reads visually. These are basically the same shape as yesterday's envelope, just turned 90 degrees but as you can see, they do quite different things on the page. This drawing is much more about the white space between the lines.

Posted: unknown time on 21.8.07
Returned: 23.8.07

20th August

I described these in my Diary Project notebook as 'sheaves'. I've always been very attracted to the shape of traditional sheaves, there's just something about that tight pulling in at the centre and then wispy flaring off at both ends that appeals to me. As a child I used to collect long ethereal grass stems and make similar little tied bundles from them - it was yet another of my repetitive childhood activities.

Posted: 11.51pm on 20.8.07
Returned: 22.8.07

19th August

I'm not quite sure what's going on here. It looks a bit like a fringed scarf but I was thinking of piping with knotted thread hanging off it. I often draw things that I think aren't quite drawings but are really embryo sculptures.

That's the great joy of drawing though, that it can be so many different things - a piece of art; an idea; a seed; a map; a diagram; a mental reminder; a plan; an exact reproduction; an illustration; a mental flight of fancy and more...

Posted: 11.47pm on 19.8.07
Returned: 22.8.07

18th August

I was feeling the need for a bit of colour.

When I'm drawing my daily envelope, I'll often check the Diary Project set on my Flickr to make sure that I'm not getting into a rut or if I suspect that an envelope might be too similar to an existing one (after more than 235 envelopes, it's easy to forget exactly what I've already drawn). I knew I hadn't drawn with colour for a while but I was still surprised to discover that there had been 19 black ink envelopes in a row!

Now, I love black ink and would have been perfectly happy to draw with it for the entire year but I'm glad that I did allow myself a choice of drawing materials because working with colour always shakes me up a bit.

Posted: 11.53pm on 18.8.07
Returned: 21.8.07

17th August

I always get a little thrill when I can post envelopes from somewhere different: this one was posted from Shrewsbury, where we were staying for a night.

This was drawn from life, which is unusual for me. It's two views of the base of an acorn that I picked up on the grounds of Shrewsbury Abbey - I found it close to a memorial to the poet, Wilfred Owen who hailed from the town. It just seemed so fitting to draw this quintessential English symbol in such a very English place.

Posted: 11.05pm on 17.8.07
Returned: 20.8.07

16th August

I was very unsure about this drawing until I added the broken line and then it suddenly all came together. It's often like that, I'll sit with something for a while, knowing that it's missing something - sometimes I find the missing thing that just lifts the drawing for me, sometimes I end up with a spoilt drawing and have to start over!

Posted: 9.20pm on 16.8.07
Returned: 20.8.07

15th August

This started out as quite a plain oval that was intended to be a very flat, two-dimensional drawing but it developed into this very three-dimensional seed instead.

Posted: 11.50pm on 15.8.07
Returned: 17.8.07

14th August

I don't remember what I was thinking about when I was drawing this but my partner saw it in progress and immediately said, "oh, piles of money" and now I can't see it as anything else.

Posted: 11.27pm on 14.8.07
Returned: 16.8.07

13th August

This envelope was inspired by a visit to Valle Crucis Abbey in North Wales. I was very taken with the dark slate walls, which had a repetitive linear quality that I found very compelling.

Posted: 11.43pm on 13.8.07
Returned: 16.8.07

12th August

Yet another drawing done in a restaurant, this time during a meal celebrating our 13th anniversary. This one was inspired by the stunning rock formations around Llangollen in North Wales. It's always much easier to find inspiration for my envelopes if I've been out and about and going somewhere completely new was particularly useful: even though I'm back home now, I'm still processing the images that I saw over the weekend.

Posted: 10.10pm on 12.8.07
Returned: 15.8.07

11th August

This envelope was drawn with an audience - several extremely curious waiters in a Bangladeshi restaurant who were fascinated by the project.

The initial spark for the drawing were the stacked hay bales I saw whilst driving up to North Wales for a weekend break.

Posted: 9.43pm on 11.8.07
Returned: 15.8.07