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Here's my watercolour version of today's #PortraitChallenge. It's a portrait by Peter Paul Rubens and I discovered it first on the @medievalpoc account on Twitter. You can find out more about it on the Museum of Fine Arts Boston website.



And the pencil lines, before I coloured them in. Check out the other drawings over at @StudioTeaBreak, they're fab! :)

Here's my drawing for today's @StudioTeaBreak #PortraitChallenge! I took a bit of liberty with her nose; I didn't want it to look like an exact copy of the photo.



Here's the original, a platinum print photo by George Charles Beresford from 1902, at the National Portrait Gallery. See other people's drawings over here on Twitter!

Here's our #PortraitChallenge drawings from last Thursday! This time we were riffing on a 1801 woodblock print by Japanese master Utamaro. I played around, drawing mine without looking at the paper. (Can you spot the messy one?) :)




You can see more over at @StudioTeaBreak.

Here's a drawing of the talented lady who makes a lot of my dresses, Esther Marfo.

Well, that's my fancy dress sorted for Shakespeare's 400th birthday party! Today's #PortraitChallenge was this engraving by Martin Droeshout, tweeted by the British Museum. Their website says it's 'from the Third Folio of Shakespeare’s works of 1663–1664 and was originally engraved for the title page to the First Folio, published in 1623. It is therefore one of the earliest portraits of Shakespeare.' (Read more here.) Lots of people have taken part; check out their pictures over at @StudioTeaBreak!

Thursday's #PortraitChallenge was Thomas Gainsborough's famous portrait of Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (which I've seen on a visit to Chatsworth House). Mine's a Pegasus-wrangling cowgirl because why not. :) You can find out more about portraits and #PortraitChallenge here on my earlier blog post.



Visit @StudioTeaBreak on Twitter to see a gallery of everyone's drawings! We're back to the #ShapeChallenge today. Do jump in, all ages and drawing abilities are very welcome! It's fun seeing whole families get involved. I love seeing all the variations!

Today's Portrait Challenge drawing for @StudioTeaBreak, based on a photo tweeted by @castledublin.



I don't think the sculptor is known, but you can find out more about Brian Boru here, and see how other people have gone about drawing him on the #PortraitChallenge hashtag!

Thursday is #PortraitChallenge day at the Virtual Studio! Here's London National Portrait Gallery's self-portrait of Mary Beale, from around 1665. She's considered England's first female professional painter (how cool is that?) and you can read more about here.



Here's the original:


And another interpretation by Dave Windett!


Keep an eye on @StudioTeaBreak and #PortraitChallenge to see if more drawings turn up. :)

Here's my latest #ShapeChallenge drawing. (See more here; a lot of Daleks today!)

Today's #ShapeChallenge drawing, with a shape set by saxophonist Alison Diamond (@ADsaxist on Twitter).



Awful news in the media today about library closures, libraries losing a quarter of staff, 343 libraries shut down since 2010. :( You can read more about it in http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-35707956 and this article in The Bookseller. It's truly awful what this government's doing; our libraries need money to upgrade themselves, not cuts.

On a lighter note, author Michele Robinson has posted 50 things that worry her when she does Author Visits. (I think the list is going up past 60 now as people keep giving her extra things to worry about. It's very funny... and TRUE.) Read The Picture Book Event Anxiety Checklist.

I have so much blogging to catch up with, but I've been working like mad on Jinks & O'Hare Funfair Repair and haven't had a second! But I did manage a #ShapeChallenge drawing today:

World Book Day/Week round-up coming soon, but here's today's #ShapeChallenge drawing:



It's based on this painting by an unknown artist of a Florentine woman in 1467:



Stuart and I have been so busy that we've been eating all week out of one pot of soup he made. Here's Stuart's favourite borsh recipe, if you want something warming. It's not really traditional Ukrainian borsh as it has tortellini in it, but it's yummy.

My latest #ShapeChallenge drawing :)

They come in peace. (Click here to see other #ShapeChallenge drawings.)



I was really taken with these #ShapeChallenge drawings by kids; in some ways, they're more proficient than mine, in their bold use of colour and pattern. @MrsJTeaches, who tweeted them, explained that she had the kids look at the shapes for two minutes and think about them, then spend ten minutes drawing inside the shape and ten minutes drawing outside it. What a great way to pace them! (She said that, if she doesn't do that, they just tend to colour inside the shape.) I'm packing away that tip for future use!



These would make amazing abstract tapestries.

Things are going well so far with the Virtual Studio. I love how people are starting to take on #ShapeChallenge as their own thing, and I'm not so much 'in charge' of it any more. I just man the @StudioTeaBreak Twitter feed so everyone who draws gets followed and a retweet and a 'like'. This weekend two teenagers, Archie and George, are setting the shapes (tweeted through their mum's account); you can see what's going on over on Twitter. Here's my drawing for Archie's shape, a man playing nose flute with his toes, at sunset. :D



On Twitter the other day, I found a link to a lovely article about LiveJournal nostalgia by Lindsey Gates-Markel (@LGatesMarkel on Twitter). She's one of a pool of us who grew up with LiveJournal and who found ourselves and our creativity supported and shaped by its community:



I'm one of the few people I know who stuck around here on LiveJournal, and not because I thought it was perfect for social networking, just because it was where I kept my brain. LiveJournal was where I made sense of my world and decided what kind of person I wanted to be, and tried it out for size. In the early days, I could make mistakes, and post bad drawings, and it didn't matter; the community was forgiving and they were just like me, people who were still trying to figure out what they were doing, and making their own mistakes. Now I can still post stuff I'm not sure about here, because most people I know have left LiveJournal and it's almost like having a private diary. I have a terrible memory, and it really helps me get a sense of what I've been doing if I can go back through it.


I once had dinner with a well-known author who'd been on tour and asked her how she could remember all the many people and places she'd met and seen. And she said she wouldn't, she'd just remember a few key things. That made me sad; I thought, I don't want some day to get to the pinnacle of a career - where a lot of people wish they could be - and not even remember what's happened. If even that famous person can't remember these thing so many people dream about, it's like they never happened, and what's the point?

Another very talented (and I would say, well-known) author friend told me she just wasn't happy yet, she couldn't quite get to that place in her career that she wanted to reach, where everyone knows her name, and she found it depressing. That also made me think. I don't want to stake my happiness on a future goal, I need to find it along the way, or I might never be content. And I want to be content - having the time to draw, have good friends, see the world a bit - way more than I want to be famous or remembered after I die. And I think the way to be content is to notice what's happening around me, and keeping my blog really helps with that.


Experimental lino-cut study of a pine cone

I think, in a way, that's become my religion, simply 'noticing things'. Whether you believe in a creator or not, if you can imagine one, try to picture how he/she/it thinks up things and makes them, a bit like an artist. Artists love to have people look - really look - at our work, and notice the details we've put into things we've made, ask thoughtful questions, and treat our creations with respect by giving us credit for them. I think that's a healthy way for me to see the world, as a place full of someone else's artwork that deserves close attention, questioning, care, and credit where credit's due. And having a blog makes me stop and do that. It helps me notice the amazing people around me, it helps me think about the work I've created (sometimes just having a blog inspires me to create something), it helps me remember the people I've met and the places I've visited. It lets me get involved in drawing challenges with people and have fun seeing what they can do and show off my own more playful stuff, instead of just being focused on my commissioned work.


Another #ShapeChallenge-inspired drawing

I love Twitter, and it's pretty much the only way people find their way to my blog, when I link to a blog post. But Twitter is often reactive. The things that people share are often things that outrage or amuse them, but it doesn't leave much space for developing a train of thought. I like it best for posting images and cartoons, because so much can be communicated with those. But if I try to have a thoughtful argument, I do much better to take it to my blog and write an article about it.


Responding to the Charlie Hebdo attacks with ideas for people who wanted to get into making comics

A Twitter audience also doesn't give much mercy if I'm not certain of what I think from the outset. And I'm very seldom certain about anything; I like talking with people to help me develop my argument; I need the chance to say stupid things, have people thoughtfully counter what I say, and learn from that. But with Twitter, I can say that stupid thing and that could be the thing that gets retweeted, leaving the whole context behind.



The other problem with Twitter (and Facebook) is that things I've worked hard on, or thought a lot about, drift down the feed and get lost. Whereas, say, I want to remember the names of people I met at Kempston Library Festival, I can pop 'jabberworks livejournal kempston' into Google and the article from 2012 will come up instantly.

I miss my old LiveJournal community, but I love the speed that things can travel on Twitter; I love how I tweeted links to the #PicturesMeanBusiness campaign articles and lots of people were talking about the issues right away. I love how people can comment on LiveJournal, but they can just as easily comment on Twitter or Facebook or wherever they want to say their bit. It's easier to have a discussion on Twitter about something when there's a blog article I can refer people back to, for context. So a combination of LiveJournal and Twitter, that's what works best for me.

I would feel silly if I tried to champion some big return to LiveJournal (popular now only really in Russia, I think). It's like trying to say MySpace might be cool again. (Ha ha!) But LiveJournal is there for me, and I'm comfortable with it, so I'll keep using it. People don't seem to mind coming to visit me in my eccentric blog home, as long as I write or draw something worth reading or looking at. Then again, maybe just because it is so totally uncool, it will take on a sort of retro glow, like Pac-Man or Atari, who knows.


Using LiveJournal to help me process the last election results

LiveJournal's not perfect. People tell me it can be hard to comment if they're not already a member; they have to jump through a few hoops to say something. (There used to be a horrible problem with spam comments, so the programmers must've dealt with it very strictly.)

Good things about LiveJournal:

* It's suprisingly Google-friendly. I think that's because it's such an old network, and its HTML format is very simple for webspiders to crawl through. (Can you sense I have no idea what I'm talking about? Yes, that's good.)

* It's simple. Our studio used to have a Wordpress blog and we kept having problems with images shifting about and doing strange things. Then we lost it completely and we'd forgotten to back it up, so that was that. LiveJournal's never once lost anything I've done. I even learned some basic HTML.

* It's slightly better than it used to be. There have been a few upgrades: pictures are easier to load; you don't really need to know any HTML. But not so much has changed that it's confusing.

* It's quiet. I can blog and blog and no one but my parents will care a hoot about what I'm doing unless I go tweet a link. That's rather nice sometimes. My parents feel more in touch with me.

So there you go.

I love you, LiveJournal. Thanks for being there for me.

Ha ha, I haven't written such a long a blog post about myself for ages, it feels like the old days. If you've got this far, thanks for sticking with me! :)

A couple more #ShapeChallenge drawings. :) (You can see the original shapes on the Twitter hash tag.)

I've been a bit negligent in posting them here, but I've been trying to do a daily doodle, inspired by the #ShapeChallenge on Twitter. Click here to see the original shapes these pictures are based on, and lots of other people's drawings!









This last one's Paul Dano, playing Pierre in the BBC six-part adaptation of War & Peace, showing on Sunday nights. The story's going so fast it makes my head spin, but Stuart and I are still enjoying it very much.

Here's my little painting for today's #ShapeChallenge:


Here's the original shape. I got rid of the red in the dot, but that's okay, I can do that. (No real rules!) :)

Here's my #ShapeChallenge drawing for today. :)



And the original shape. See loads more here, they're amazing! Feel free to print out any of the shapes and try them yourself.



Love this one by @DazNewall:

Here are a couple shapes from this weekend's #ShapeChallenge: my shape from Friday and the one @MrEFinch set on Sunday. (Thanks, Ed, for taking the weekend! I missed drawing Saturday's.)



You can see lots of awesome drawings here on the #ShapeChallenge hashtag.





And here's Monday's shape! Feel free to turn it any direction (or do anything you like, really!).

Here's a portrait I drew of Stuart in his Norwegian jumper. He's not grumpy, he's concentrating hard on his homework for Russian class. Also, he has grown a bit of a beard over the holidays.

Try drawing Tintin & Snowy without looking at your paper, it's fun. :)

Little portrait drawing, which looks a bit like Edith Sitwell and may or may not be based on certain jaunty photo of Philip Reeve, heh heh...

I caught sight of some tweets from the British Museum today with photos of some amazing ancient #AfricanRockArt paintings. (Here's the full article.) I loved this photo with all these big-hipped people:


Four Warrior style figures, Eastern Aïr Mountains, Niger - by TARA/David Coulson, British Museum collection online

...So based on the painting, I made a little doodle. :)


I'm letting my membership pass go to waste; I really must get back to the British Museum and do some more drawing.