Here is my first water colour in a very long time and I’m very pleased with it.

I had been so looking forward to a computer free day and had planned all the drawing I was going to do. Alas! I spent most of the day trying to scan the above picture to send to the publishers who need it for promotion. I’ve upgraded my Mac operating system recently and so the scanner doesn’t work anymore. It only scans a part of the image and then rotates it twenty degrees! I spent the afternoon backing up my old laptop so I could put that back to the old system, this involved having to back up and lose my Sat Nav, which involved a couple of hours of recovery. Alas! It din’thelp as the same thing happened on the laptop, which is very odd.

I woke up this morning with the brilliant idea of installing the software on my wife’s ageing XP computer. Hooray – success! Just a drag having to move artwork about to scan.

The scanner is no longer made, or anything like it, which is a shame. The HP4670 is a see-through scanner that you can place on top of artwork so you see exactly what you are scanning. this is great for me as I can scan artwork that is still stretched on a drawing board. I don’t want to take it off the board for scanning until I know I have finished the work. This way I can scan at any stage of the painting process and compare. Also, while the picture is still stretched, it is nice and flat. Watercolours have a habit of curling and ruckling.

Perhaps today I can have a relatively computer free day!

Tomorrow I paint! I’ve spent the last three years glued to my computer screen producing digital artwork, but tomorrow I start painting a new book. It’s not very long – it’s a first phonics story that I wrote earlier this year.

But… I’ve hardly touched my paintbox in three years! How will I do? I’m prepared to do several versions to get my eye back in, but I’d rather get it right first time.

Working on the screen makes your mind work in a different way. I’m hoping the experience will positively affect my real paint work. I’m excited. I’m so bored working on the computer. It will be lovely to feel real paint and paper again.