Travelling sketchbook - life drawing - a slice of my life

In May, the sketchbook I received had a picture of a clock and I started thinking about time and what it might mean for me.

I started off thinking about the aging of the brain through time (don't ask!).

Then I went to the Hay Festival and did a mind-blowing two and a half hour life drawing class with the Royal Drawing School. It was marvellous: scary, intense - an 'in for a penny, in for a pound' type, rollercoaster of an experience.

We started off with charcoal and a paper towel and 3 minute warm up sketches. The class was very mixed in terms of ability and it moved fast: you either pitched in, forgot yourself and had fun, or I'm guessing it could have been a pretty intimidating time.

I must say, those experiences get me buzzing.

After our 3 minute sketches, we did some (very..) slightly longer 5 minute work and then went into three ten minute sketches on the same sheet of much larger paper, the first two rubbed out to leave a ghost image. Very annoying to rub something out if you think it worked, but all in the service of the exercise in hand!

Anyway, suffice to say, it was fab and I'll be doing it again next year if the chance arises!

And - I decided to put a couple of the rather cronky 3 minute sketches in the travelling sketchbook this time. Six minutes of my life. Time enough. It needed to be the actual sketches or it wouldn't have been the actual time! (By the way, I'm absolutely not suggesting that these sketches are any good, but if you don't pitch in, there is no way, you'll improve, to my way of thinking.)

I decided to 'underframe' each piece with three timed minutes of an account of the class, to visually frame each stuck in, folded sketch (which inconveniently enough, didn't fit the page: that's art for you). So twelve minutes of my life, in aspic in this sketchbook.

Not the most immediately visually impactful pages, but hopefully a slightly different way of encapsulating a creative process.