Michael Nobbs

Tag: life

  • A broken pencil at 3.00 am

    A close-up of a small homemade sketchbook page containing an early-morning self-portrait. The face is partly drawn in black with bold blue glasses, dense black hair and a red area at the bottom of the page. The handwritten note at the top reads, “3:00am My pencil broke so I stopped. I’m not sure I’m going back to sleep.”

    I was following my current early-morning drawing compulsion of pouring out my tea and reaching for my mirror and sketchbook. It was even earlier than usual — 3.00 am today — and I’d rather have still been sleeping. But the rule seems to be: I wake up, make tea and draw myself. So that’s what I was doing.

    When the pencil broke

    Midway through drawing, the lead of my pencil broke. I’d been using a rather lovely old and waxy Derwent Drawing pencil in Ivory Black and enjoying the heavy, pastel-like quality of its lines. It was as I was working the pencil hard, drawing the now familiar line of my mouth, that the lead simply crumbled. In that moment, the spell was broken and I was able to stop drawing.

    I realised I liked where the drawing had ended and decided to leave it where it was. Switching to a pen, I grounded the drawing in the moment with an early-morning report in the corner.

    I think — and this is new — even though the drawing was “unfinished”, being forced to stop meant my compulsion to draw had been quenched and I was able to relax into being awake and drink my tea.

    A second drawing

    After a little while, I reached for my newly started A4 Fabriano sketchbook and began another drawing, not because I needed to, but because I wanted to. This time I drew slowly, probably for about an hour, stopping regularly to enjoy my tea and notice the sound of the rain on the window above my head.

    Something interesting happened with this drawing. The self-portrait was drawn first, with the now-sharpened Derwent, much as I’ve been drawing them these past couple of weeks. But then I switched to my broad-nibbed Kaweco Sport and returned to the very familiar language and materials of my tea-tray drawings. It was as if these two, until now separate ways of drawing, met for the first time.

    At 4.20 am I added a few words to ground this drawing too: It’s raining hard. I’m awake and drinking tea and thinking I might just make a second pot.

    In the end I didn’t. I fell asleep instead.

    A small homemade sketchbook resting on the bed beneath a round mirror. The page shows an early-morning self-portrait with bold blue glasses, black hair and a red area of clothing. In the mirror above, my face, yellow phone and green teapot are visible. Handwritten text on the drawing begins, “3:00am My pencil broke so I stopped…”
    An A4 sketchbook open on the bed beneath a round mirror and tea tray. The page contains a large self-portrait framed by the outline of the mirror, with black hair and glasses. Below and around the portrait is a blue chicken-patterned tea-tray mat, drawn in pen and Neocolor II. A handwritten note at the upper right records being awake at 4:20am, listening to the rain and drinking tea.
    A close-up of an A4 sketchbook page showing a large self-portrait inside the drawn outline of a round mirror. The face has black hair, glasses and loosely drawn features. The lower part of the page is filled with a blue chicken-patterned tea-tray mat, with small hens picked out in black, red and blue.

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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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