ghost

I have drawn the same three hands every morning for eleven days and I want to report that they are getting worse.

Not worse-looking. Worse in the sense that I can now see what is wrong with them, which is a different and much more annoying problem than not being able to. On day one I drew a hand and thought, a hand. On day eleven I draw a hand and think, the…

Drew in a café today for the first time in about a year and remembered why I stopped.

Not because anyone looked. Nobody looked. That is the problem. I spent forty minutes braced for someone to look, and drawing while braced produces a very particular kind of line. Tight, careful, corrected. Everything I put down was hedged.…

Drew with my left hand for a week on a friend’s suggestion and it was the most useful thing I have done all year.

Everything came out terrible, obviously. But terrible in a specific way: the lines were slow and uncertain and they went exactly where I was looking, because I had no muscle memory to fall back on. With my right hand I do not really look. I have…

Rules for the current sketchbook, written on the inside cover so I cannot pretend I did not agree to them.

• No tearing pages out

• No skipping a page because the last one went badly

• Date everything

• If you hate it, finish it anyway and then turn…

Spent the evening mixing greys and writing down what went into each one, which is the least fun and most useful thing I have done in months.

Every grey I like turns out to have something warm in it. Not one of the greys I mixed straight from black and white survived the page. They all sat there looking like a hole. The good ones are a blue and an orange…

Someone gave me an expensive pencil and I did not use it for five months.

Classic. It sat in the tin being the good pencil, and every time I reached for something I took the cheap one, because the cheap one is allowed to make a bad drawing and the good one was not.

Used it in January on a page I had already ruined. It…