At the Cass sale in town. Finally got the Derwent Coloursoft pencils I’ve had my eye on. I was only going to get 36, but they didn’t have the 36 tins, 24 seemed too few. I was seriously considering the 48 (in a lovely wooden box, but very heavy) when I discovered that they had the 72 for only £3 more than the 48 – £40 reduced from £104! I guess the outcome was inevitable after that, but it took a while to get there. I also found some nice pastel paper in good cool blues and greys which looks suitable for winter mountain pictures and got a couple of putty rubbers, a black and a sepia drawing pens and a little plastic palette which will allow me to more quickly remove my watercolours from any communal table they may be occupying with a minimum of fuss. Lots of fun

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Went and visited my masseuse Magdalena and got soundly squished, albeit gently around the damaged limb. Heavenly. Feeling much better for it and leg much less painful this afternoon. She has recommended that I embark upon a course of “Manual Lymphatic Drainage” which sounds horrendous and conjures up images of Frankenstein laboratories, big needles and pumps, but is actually a type of very gentle long-term massage. Sounds interesting, so I might sign up for that when we’re back from Switzerland.

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Some scary stuff cropping up since the last time I did them. It’s just really all about the fear. I identified four key fears out of about 5 pages of scribble – 1. of letting people down, 2. of not producing enough, 3. of my artistic isolation, 4. that my ideas aren’t good enough for people to take me seriously or might be old-fashioned or derivative. Sheesh! They’re some pretty heavy-duty worries, unlike last time when it all felt a bit trivial. So I’ve made a new set of affirmations which I’m working on putting into my composition journal so I’ll always have them with me, and am planning to do some solid work with them over the next few months. It may all sound like complete rubbish but it’s amazing what these things can do when you give them a chance…

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in my composition book – I wanted to keep a page out of the Millais exhibition notes, on his stunning portrait of Louise Joplin, but it looked too plain against the paper, so I found some old dark-green tissue paper and stuck that over the page last night, then today added in the page and part of the cover to remind myself of where I’d found it. Looks much better than if plain.

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I went for a walk and attempted a few quick pen sketches while I was at it. Not fabulous, although I was quite pleased with the quick drawing of a man who was standing staring at the ground, which was encouraging because my figures are usually All Wrong in a big way.

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I’ve had certain tracks from Dire Straits’ album Brothers in Arms (esp. “So Far Away”, “Your Latest Trick” and “Brothers in Arms”) stuck in my head for several weeks now. I don’t know why – I was never a huge Dire Straits fan and while I liked this album I’d never bothered to buy it and hadn’t even thought about it for years. I have no idea what started this “ear-worm” (as I believe the literal translation of the German term for this phenomenon has it) but it was driving me nuts, hearing these little bits and not the whole song, so when I put in my last Amazon order I figured What The Hell, for £5 it was worth it. So listening to it now, and enjoying it, but somehow it’s kind of like running my brain through the speakers. Odd.

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… while I cooked dinner. I’ve been meaning to start practising drawing directly with a pen, rather than using a pencil underdrawing, so I can loosen up and just practise getting used to judging angles correctly, so I just pulled out the pen and a spare moleskine cahier and did rough sketches of some plates, the pork grilling over the gas and some zucchini in their tray, spending about 2-3 minutes on each (and interspersed with dinnery type activity). They came out OK and once some coloured pencil was added, actually looked pretty convincing. Going to try to do more of this.

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Having printing problems – if I save as TIFF or other bitmap then I get jaggies on my hairpins; if I save as EPS I get nice smooth hairpins, but slightly fuzzy staves (not to mention having to review every inch of text to check it retained its font and still looks the same once printed from Windows). Still trying to fix this one. I don’t quite understand it because previous Finale versions always managed to export a nice smooth hairpin to TIFF, so it’s either a Mac thing (unlikely) or a Fin 2006 thing (pathetic). Grr.

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I did 2 pastel paintings of a trio of lemons in my brown craft paper notebook that I got when we were going to Wales. The pastel sits really nicely on the paper – much better than the watercolour pencil which had a bit of a struggle. The first one I tried without much smudging, the second one quite smudgy and a little more adventurous with the colour.

I don’t know that I have any lemon stories. We had a great bush lemon in the garden when I was growing up and I liked to eat them, but these lemons are not those lemons, so I kind of skipped the journaling part of it and just stuck with the lemons.

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And recorded it into Finale. Nothing that sounds particularly useful, but it felt good to be fiddling about a bit again. I played some Bach, Mozart and some of my eggs afterwards too, which I haven’t done in ages.

A sideline: Post number 100!!

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