Did a swatch with Staedtler ergosoft pencils - nice bright hues and the colours overlay each other really well. They look better on cartridge paper than on white bond.

Letraset Promarker swatch. The colours are much stronger when scanned as a colour photo rather than a colour document.

Here's my dynamic composite entitled 'Wondering'. As you can see, I enjoyed playing about with warp, rotate and opacity. I need to find out how to save things in different, more compressed formats. I tried to upload the PSD onto the blog, without success. Would it have worked as a JPG? In the end I have scanned it in. We'll see tomorrow if it prints at A1.

Townscape Paris, 1968. Gerhard Richter. Saw retrospective at Tate Modern. Thinking about damaged landscapes, untruthfulness of landscapes, nature is 'always against us, knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy' (watched 'Grizzly Man' last night). Abstractions help us think about 'inexplicable reality'.

Sketch design 1, axonometric. Not sure why the A4 won't scan in its entirety and the edges are lost. I can see that the couple of lines I did with the 'Rotring' are clearer than the ones I did after I read the brief and saw we were to use felt pen.

You spend all summer looking for an inventor and then a great one goes and dies. Wilson Greatbatch (1919-2011, inventor of the pacemaker and lithium batteries amongst other things) said something like 'do not fear failure or crave success, your work should be an act of love.' I find that strangely helpful when confronting those 'can't do' moments

Sequential sketches - 2 minutes per view

It would help if I found a standard style of human figure for indicating scale.

Okay, I did spend more than 2 minutes per thumbnail but, as in yesterday's class, I discovered that the more I engage my head, and the less spontaneous the effort, the more unsuccessful is my 'product'. Interesting how the different media have come out. The gouache looks far too heavy on paper but has luminous qualities on screen.