Black tomato . . .

. . . grown this year for the first time. haven't tasted it yet. It weighs 9 1/2 ounces! Red underneath, black on top, light variations in the photos. There are a few more on the plant, still normal tomato size and very green yet, but this baby is enormous! Move over Jamie Oliver (which is where I first saw them).

Doodling the summer away

At the moment I only seem to be happy with a pen and a bit of paper in my hand.  Exaggeration, but pen and paper do seem to have replaced needle and thread for a bit.  So far I've used one and a half small homemade books, pages in a 23p from Tesco lined notebook, various bits of paper that happen to be lying about, including this brown A5 (or is it 6) envelope that arrived with a Quilters' Guild regional newsletter in it!

The photos are in the wrong order.  I did the b/w one first, setting out simply to try drawing the circle things, but then just having to create a whole page design.  Then i found my stash of gel pens and had to try them out, to see if there were empty ones to throw away, and that turned into another design, on the other side of the envelope.  More fun at the breakfast table that failing to complete the sudoku.  And 3 pens got weeded out.

Like the zentangle people say (link in previous post, from which you can get onto an endless chain of other 'tanglers') this kind of drawing activity does seem to have effects that you might not expect, like a general loosening up and growth of confidence where drawing is concerned.  I guess that these things might occur whatever it was you were drawing, if you started doing it a lot.  But with these doodles you don't have the pressure of trying to make the drawing look like something and losing confidence when it doesn't. 

I like the idea of doodling on spare scraps, which in my mind links the somewhat structured, rather more considered and deliberate art of the zentangle style with those mindless scribbles on the phone pad, the back of an envelope or the Co op till receipt.