Michael Nobbs

Tag: DailyPractice

  • Drawing in the Dark (Again)

    A softly lit tea-tray scene resting on a crocheted blanket. On the patterned tray are a lime-green teapot, orange Stanley mug, stainless-steel flask, and a carton of Alpro Barista Oat milk. In front of them lies an open sketchbook showing a bold drawing of the same objects, partly coloured with red, blue, and ochre Neocolor crayon. A small lamp casts a warm yellow light across the page and teapot, turning the whole arrangement into a cosy night-time study in repetition and reflection.

    I was excited to pick up my sketchbook this morning. After yesterday’s experience of drawing in the dark, I was keen to experiment a little more.

    Only a little light

    There was a small pool of light cast from my bedside reading lamp to the left, but the tray in its usual position on the bed was mostly in darkness. I could just make out the familiar shapes of the things on it, but much wasn’t clear.

    I began with the ninety-degree Perspex handle on the lid of my new bright orange insulated mug. I drew the gentle curve of the top of the mug and immediately felt the comfort and pleasure that can come from drawing. I couldn’t see the shape of the mug’s handle, so I drew that from memory — and did the same with the Stanley motif on the front.

    Next came the flask, drawn a little less clumsily than yesterday, and the milk jug — a mix of what I could see and what I remembered from drawing it so many times before. Then the oat-milk carton. The top half was lit better and I could observe it directly, but this wasn’t my usual brand, so when I reached the darker lower half I left much of it undrawn. Then my teapot: familiar from memory, but not quite right.

    Choosing colour by instinct

    Finally I added the crocheted blanket the tray was sitting on. As yesterday, I chose colours without seeing them clearly — relying on the remembered length of each crayon and a sense of how light or dark it felt. I did better at choosing today, though I didn’t know for sure which colours I’d picked until daylight began to seep into the room.

    At first, I hadn’t planned to include the illustrated hens on the mat (or to colour it), but I was enjoying the session and gaining confidence in drawing from memory. As the room brightened, I could make out the white shapes of the hens, though not their details, so I added a few approximations. To finish, I coloured the mat with what I hoped was a Neocolor II Ochre crayon — it was.

    A litte fiddling!

    When I decided the drawing was finished, I realised there wasn’t much space left to add the date, so I tucked it into one of the white borders of the crocheted blanket squares. Unable to stop myself fiddling (and breaking my rule of the drawing being finished when I add the date), I added a couple of small touches of colour where I’d missed before — the only moment of dissatisfaction in an otherwise deeply satisfying drawing.

    A closer view of the open sketchbook resting on the tray, its pages filled with a line drawing of the morning tea-tray — the Alpro carton, flask, teapot, and Stanley mug — outlined in black and filled with bright blocks of ochre, red, and blue. The yellow lamplight gives the page a golden tone, echoing the warmth of the objects around it. The date “12-11-25” appears in the top corner, anchoring the drawing as part of the ongoing Tea-Tray series.

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  • Familiar Spouts, a Mr Kipling Apple Pie and My New Mug

    An open sketchbook rests on a tray covered with a printed cloth of small illustrated chickens. The drawing on the page is made entirely in pencil: a jug with a pronounced spout, a teapot, an insulated mug with a lidded top, and several loosely sketched chickens. The jug appears slightly larger in scale than the other objects. The drawing is left in line only, with no colour or text added it is dated 7-11-25 in the bottom right corner. Above the sketchbook, the real objects sit on the tray: the jug, the teapot, the insulated mug, and a small pie in its wrapper. The scene is arranged on a softly crocheted blanket made up of blue and purple squares with a white borders. A small white reading lamp lights the scene with a gentle orange glow, and the overall feeling is quiet and domestic.

    Today I turned my new tea-tray mat over, revealing a calm brown background. I also added a Mr Kipling apple pie to my tray — something with warm associations from long ago. Together these two small changes helped me into a calmer space before I started drawing than I was in yesterday.

    I began the drawing with the spout of my milk jug. I get pleasure and comfort from drawing its shape — the same is true of my teapot spout. After drawing both, I moved on to my new insulated mug, starting with the little sticking-out piece of its lid. I can see that this might become a familiar starting point — it isn’t yet, but the possibility that it might pleases me.

    I made the decision to include the chickens on the tray mat — more unfamiliarity — but then I spotted a chicken that was familiar. It is the same as the one on my lesser-used (but still often drawn) Go Gently George mug. Seeing that one helped the other illustrated chickens feel friendlier. I was getting to know them better as I drew. Quite suddenly, I realised I was enjoying myself, and noticed that the new mug is more on the page and part of the drawing than it was yesterday.

    No colour today, no text. I rather like the open space left on the page.

    A calmer time drawing — and, with the new insulated mug, my tea was still hot when I finished.

    A close view of an open sketchbook page showing a pencil drawing of an arrangement of tea things on a tray. A jug, teapot, insulated mug, and a number of chickens are drawn with strong lines. The photograph is a closely cropped view of the sketchbook, but the top of the image shows the tray from the drawing and includes a small reading light casting an orange glow and a stub of a yellow pencil with a gold ferrule. It can be seen that the chickens from the drawing are illustrations on a brown mat that is covering the tray. The image suggests a feeling of intimacy, cosiness, and domesticity.

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  • Drawing through unease

    A tea tray rests on a plaid duvet cover. On it sist an earthenware *Louise Go Gently* mug, a green *Teapot for Life*, and a small brown pharmacy bag — the newest object in the familiar scene. In front of the tray sits a open sketchbook, the drawing in it depicts is of the mug and pharmacy bag from the tray. The drawing is made with with grapa mixture of crayon and coloured pencil: a Blackwing 3 for the structure, a Derwent Lightfast *Warm Earth* for the bag, and a Faber-Castell Polychromos white pencil for the highlights. There are two large block of colour made with Neocolor ii crayon — Black for the top page background and Purple for the bottom. The text on the top page of the drawing reads "A new addition to my tray — a bag containing a five day course of antibiotics. The lines are restless, layered, and uncertain — showing the artist’s continuing effort to steady both hand and mind.
    A close-up of the. sketchbook shows the pharmacy bag and Go Gently mug drawing in more detail. The layered pencil marks show repeated attempts to find the form, the paper lightly burnished where the pencil has pressed down. The image carries both restlessness and care — the marks revealing anxiety and persistence in equal measure.
    A close view of the sketchbook page showing the delicate graphite lines of a cup and saucer. The paper’s grain catches the light; the strokes are faint, tentative, and broken. A few erased beginnings remain visible. The image feels quiet and vulnerable — a small attempt to steady the hand amid unease.
    An open sketchbook lies on a bed beside tray of tea things. On the right-hand page, a few trembling graphite lines describe the edge of a cup and saucer. The marks are sparse, hesitant, and uneven — a visual trace of anxiety and restlessness. The facing page carries loose handwritten text added several days later, the words slanting and uneven, echoing the same tremor that ran through the drawing itself.

    The drawings that trouble me

    Lately, I’ve been thinking about the drawings that make me uncomfortable, embarrass me — the ones I’d like to rip out of my sketchbook and forget.

    This week there have been two of them (so far!): A Few Ragged Lines, drawn in the museum café just after my dental appointment, and A New Addition to My Tray, made from bed this morning.

    In the café, I managed only a few hesitant marks before realising how shaky I was. The drawing stopped almost as soon as it began. Today, a few days later, I added the text and then began A New Addition to My Tray — my first attempt at drawing since that trip to the dentist. I realised quickly that I was still dealing with anxiety. The text on A Few Ragged Lines is ragged and uncertain — I corrected myself more than once — and in A New Addition to My Tray I kept reworking the small brown pharmacy bag. The more I drew, the more uneasy I felt.

    On embarrassment and honesty

    There’s a particular kind of embarrassment that comes with this — when a drawing feels raw, clumsy, too revealing. Some of that embarrassment is about what the drawing might expose, but more immediately it’s about how it looks: awkward, unresolved, unskilled. It’s the discomfort of seeing something I’ve made that doesn’t live up to how I wanted it to be. For a while I often can’t bear to open my sketchbook and look at what I’ve made.

    After a few days (sometimes hours), those feelings can shift. With A Few Ragged Lines, that has happened — I have begun to see the original lines that I made on Thursday, not as failures, but as traces of persistence, an honest snapshot of a difficult moment in my life. The trembling, the awkwardness, the unresolved forms: they all speak of the effort to keep going, even when calm attention won’t quite come. Maybe, in time, I’ll be able to see today’s drawing in a similar light…

    Preserving the work as it is

    Part of my practice now is to preserve and reveal my sketchbooks exactly as they are. Once I add the date to a drawing, it’s finished — a small record of that moment, however incomplete or uneasy it feels. I want to resist the temptation to tidy, edit, or hide these pages. I want them to remain a true reflection of the moment that they were made, however that feels and whatever they reveal.

    I’ve been thinking about whether adding text to A Few Ragged Lines days later sits outside my usual way of working. Because the text was written on the opposite page and dated separately, it still feels fitting somehow. Perhaps it simply reflects how the drawing continued to work on me for a few days before I could meet it again. It’s something to keep in mind for future pages.

    The practice of staying

    Embarrassment, I realise, is often just the shock of honesty — the moment when a drawing shows something we didn’t mean to reveal, whether that’s in its awkward form or in the feelings it carries. It’s uncomfortable, but it’s also what makes the work alive. Those uneven marks and half-resolved shapes tell the truth of how things were: the body still unsettled, the hand trying to steady itself, the mind circling back to breath.

    I’m realising that these uneasy drawings belong to the practice just as much as the easy ones do. Maybe they are the practice — the record of staying with myself, however briefly, in a moment I’d rather have avoided.

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  • Trying to Draw My Teapot to Calm Myself

    An open sketchbook lies on a patterned blanket beside a tea-tray with a familiar lime green _Teapot For Life_ teapot, a comforting white _Louise Go Gently_ mug, and pencils. The pages show large handwritten text in turquoise-blue reading “Trying to draw my teapot to calm myself down (I’m going to the dentist today!), but don’t seem to be able to draw today.” On the right page is a loose drawing of the same teapot in Light Olive and Grey, set against a background of Silver Grey Neocolor and dark scribbled marks. The whole scene conveys a mix of anxiety and tenderness — an attempt to find calm through drawing.

    I’d been okay last night, but this morning I woke up feeling very anxious about today’s dental appointment. Early-morning anxiety used to be a regular occurrence when I was first diagnosed with ME, and a more generalised social anxiety has followed me through my life — though I wasn’t always aware of it. I’ve always struggled with going to the dentist.

    I’d hoped that my current morning routine of making tea followed by making a drawing would help to calm me today, as it did to some extent yesterday. I decided to keep it simple and just draw my teapot — something I’ve done hundreds of times. But today nothing felt right. I tried to draw slowly, beginning with the teapot’s spout, then gradually adding the top of the pot, its handle and hinge.

    I’m not someone who worries much about perspective, but I do look for something that feels satisfying — something that works within its own small visual world. After three attempts, filling the page in ways I wouldn’t normally do, I found I was adding drawing anxiety to my dental anxiety. I drew one more version of the teapot and decided that it would have to do, no matter how it turned out.

    I added some colour to distinguish it from the earlier attempts, then layered a heavy scribble of Silver Grey Neocolor II over the top to partly obscure them. At that point I began to enjoy myself, and the drawing anxiety (if not the dental) began to recede. There’s something satisfying about those semi-hidden lines under the grey — a quiet record of my anxious searching for calm.

    Home now from my appointment and resting on the bed with a second pot of tea, the dental anxiety has passed. Perhaps it was an anxiety that no amount of drawing could dampen. But drawing could record it — and distract me for a while — and maybe that’s enough.

    The full text reads:

    Trying to draw my teapot to calm myself down (I’m going to the dentist today!), but I don’t seem to be able to draw today!

    A close view of the sketchbook page focusing on the teapot drawing. The familiar _Teapot For Life_ teapot is rendered in Light Olive and Grey, with black and red marks around the rim, set against a softly worked Silver Grey background. The turquoise handwriting in Chrysocolla Blue pencil is visible on the opposite page. Pencil and crayon lines show three earlier attempts to find the form. The image feels both unsettled and intimate — the drawing and words merging into a small act of self-soothing.

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  • Don’t Shake Me (Anymore!)

    ng yellow in the lamplight), travel mug, Oatly Barista carton, and a Go Gently mug sit around an open Moleskine sketchbook. The drawing shows a mug and the Oatly carton in Neocolor II Black, Purple, and Silver Grey, with handwritten text on the left page.

    Drawn in bed early this morning — a mug and the Oatly carton from the tray beside me. The drawing is simple: just those two things, made with Neocolor II Black, Purple, and Silver Grey, and a Blackwing 3 pencil.

    The last few days have felt shaky. The process of trying to buy a car has left me feeling very unsettled. G. woke me in the night as I was calling out for help in my sleep — rescuing me from a nightmare in which I was being stabbed.

    I was still feeling jittery when I awoke properly and was pleased to have my usual morning routine — make tea, put it on my tea-tray, take it back to bed, reach for my sketchbook — to fall into. It was as I was putting my oat milk on the tray that I noticed the “Shake Me” lettering on the carton, and I began the drawing in my head as I climbed the stairs back to bed.

    The finished drawing feels raw and unsettling — the colours echoing the words on the page:
    Feeling shaken and jittery. Buying a new car has all been a bit too much. Woke up at 2:00 a.m. shouting out for help. Don’t SHAKE ME (anymore!).
    It captures the moment as I was drawing and will be a reminder of my night-terror.

    I think this morning, the act of drawing (even more so than usual), was an attempt at steadying myself through its familiar routine. Today, I’m not sure that was wholly successful — but it did help.

    A close-up of the open sketchbook showing the drawing and handwritten note. The right page depicts the Oatly carton and mug in Neocolor II Black, Purple, and Silver Grey, with “Shake Me!” visible on the carton. The soft lamplight and plaid duvet convey quiet vulnerability and the effort to stay steady.

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