As anyone who has a regular art practice knows, learning from those gone before you is as critical as the amount of time you spend drawing. So, when the Australian Society of Authors advertised an online workshop with Australian picture book legend, Ann James, I jumped at the chance.

I never go into these webinars thinking I’m going to come away with a million bits of gold dust that will instantly make me a supercharged performer. In any workshop I participate in, I’m looking for one thing (maybe two) that I can carry with me as I evolve as an artist. Curiously, in this one by Anne James, it wasn’t necessarily her personal advice that struck a chord. It was an anecdote she shared; some sage advice from another illustration great, a friend of hers, Leigh Hobbs. He said,

You’ve got to let the line breathe.

Ahhh. Feels nice already, doesn’t it? One year on, I’m still thinking about this idea, so I thought I’d write some notes to my future self (with some reference pictures) to remind me of what on earth this means.

Breathe in…

What Leigh was talking about was related to the bold, striking style we so dearly associate with him – pen and wash. See, as it turns out when you’re adding watercolour wash to your pen work, you’ve got a choice about how precisely you ‘colour in’ your lines. You can choose to bring your colour riiiight up close to the line, so it touches it, or, you can bring your wash near (but not touching) the line. The latter is what Leigh means by ‘breathing room’. It’s the space that an illustrator chooses to leave between the wash and the line that has some exciting characteristics.

Why bother thinking about this? I’m glad you asked. You know that saying, less is more? Well, the less you colour in, the more you leave open to the viewer to fill in the blanks. This means you’re producing a more fulfilling experience for the viewer and doing less work in the process. Any way you look at it, it’s a win. Here’s what happens.

Increase energy and movement in your illustration

Even if you’ve got a really expressive line (think width, shape, brokenness), giving that line some ‘breathing room’ lets the pen and wash work together to ‘jiggle’ the image. It gives it motion. The space you leave is filled in by the viewer, their eyes move back and forward as they try to close the gap themselves. Whether they realise it or not, it’s exciting.

Provide a stronger indication of light

The best way to paint light is to paint only the shadows. By leaving some whitespace between the line and the colour, the viewer will read it as the brightest part of the image. They just cannot avoid this. It’s a bit like magic. You can simply suggest the colour of the surface, and the viewer does the rest.

Extend an invitation to interpret

If you have a pen and wash image that’s a little claustrophobic (coloured all the way up to the lines), there’s less to intrigue the viewer. They can see the line, and the colour you’ve applied, and so it’s read as a complete, finalised shape. By giving the line a bit of breathing room, there’s SO much more for the reader to interrogate. They can question what the true colour of the object is. They can read the light source. The angles between the pen and the shape of the wash can indicate contour. It merely makes each image slightly more interesting, and, well, fun.

Reveal the human behind the work

A picture book on a shelf in a bookstore is pretty perfect. It’s nicely finished. Perfectly bound. If you buy one, you’re expecting ‘quality’ for your money. But, as humans, we’re drawn to imperfection. No one is perfect, and for some reason, we like to see other humans being imperfect too. So, while we want our picture books not to fall apart the second we buy them, a breath in an image helps the reader imagine the artist who made the contents. They imagine the process by which a human put brush and ink to the page. They probably imagine someone sitting at their crafty desk, surrounded by all of their beautiful art supplies. It’s an endearing and highly sought after job after all. It prompts them to question things, too. Why did the artist not ‘finish’ colouring in? Was it a mistake? Was it intentional? The questions increase engagement and participation, which, in the end, is what being an artist is about.

Breathe out

Letting the line breathe is a beautiful piece of advice and not one I see anywhere on the internet when ‘pen and wash’ is discussed. The technique is rife in some of our most accomplished illustrators. When you start looking for it, it’s everywhere.

I’m a serial project starter. I come up with ideas that always feel like the best idea I’ve ever had. I’m motivated and excited by what this thing could be. It’s energising and all-consuming. Then, I start the work.

Soon enough, the initial burst of energy fades away, and I end up puzzled. That thing I started is just hard now. It’s boring. I’ve had a million other ideas in the meantime, and they’re all much more exciting than the one I’ve slogged away with over the last few weeks. The temptation is to drop what I’m doing and follow the new shiny thing.

But if a project is never finished, then no one can ever see it. And if no one can ever see it, then why did I spend all that time at the start doing it? Sure, it was fun. But what’s less fun is having one hundred unfinished projects laying about the house. When you see that work piled up, it can be quite de-motivating. Suddenly, even starting something new starts to lose its lustre.

When something is finished, when it has an end, it’s something that people can begin to respond to. No one can say you wrote a great story if the story only has a beginning and a middle. No one can love your painting (even you) if you’ve stopped at the underpainting.

Just. Get. To. The… End

When people respond to a finished work, it means something. People either hate it, love it, or they aren’t moved by it all. And that’s all OK. The response might guide you to your next project. It might be encouraging. It’s feedback to say, “Do more of that please, that added value to my life. I enjoyed it too.” And if you get the opposite response? Find out why? Art is subjective, sure, but maybe the viewer has some excellent insight into your work that you never saw while you were making it. It might be the key to unlocking your next project or taking your practice to the next level in some way.

So, when you start something, finish it. It sounds simple, but practising getting to the end is a skill that takes effort and time. And when you see someone else feel the way you did when you first started the project, well, that feeling becomes addictive.

Wow, do I take my vision for granted?

I’m writing this having just finished being part of a storytime by the incredible Feelix Library at Vision Australia. I was asked to read my book, Eric the Postie, to children with vision-impairment and then spend some time engaging in some fun, letter-related activities designed by the team at the Library.

There are certain experiences in life that challenge how you engage with the world so deeply that they leave a profoundly lasting impact on the way you view the world from then on. This one was one of those moments.

I take nothing, let me repeat, NOTHING, for granted more than my vision. And I suspect most of us with two working eyeballs are the same. It’s the one underlying assumption about human function that has shaped systems and processes that we use every single day.

How do you know which is the hot or cold tap if you can’t see it? How do you drive (or navigate public transport)? How do you know you’ve arrived at your friend’s house? Or the right workplace when you get into work in the morning? The weight by which we rely on our visual system is immense in everyday life, let alone some who makes picture books.

As a picture book maker, visual literacy is core to what I do. I spend hours on end studying how to improve it and push its boundaries. But how does a reader engage with a picture book when, well, they can’t see it?

Reading to kids who can’t see

I’ve never read to kids who can’t see. I’ve lived such a privileged, first-world life, that I don’t have any friends or relatives who suffer from vision deficiency to this degree. When I run workshops with sighted kids, I’m used to saying things like, “Can you see what this character is doing here?” Or “What do you think about this colour?” I engage them using vision-based language. It’s an auto-pilot thing that, in the context of a storytime with low-vision children, seems, well, offensive in some way.

I’ll admit it, as the kids started to arrive, I did my introvert thing and went into my shell. I had to learn how the adults who spend their lives around vision-impaired children engage with them. I’m not trained in this; I didn’t know what was ‘normal’ but I knew I couldn’t just point at something across the other side of the room to draw a child’s attention to it. I had to learn to see without using my eyes.

Engaging all the senses

At an intellectual level, it sounds easy. Well, you have four other senses, use those. But vision-based habits run deep, and it takes a lot of mental effort to prioritise the other senses. The good news is that once the penny drops, things become more comfortable and, well, somewhat magical.

Sounds come first

Sound is our obvious fallback. We yell, talk, and whisper to each other all the time, even if we’re sighted. Objects make noises too, sounds that (as a sighted person) you’ve probably never thought much about. The kids loved the dongs and dings of dropping PVC pipe on the floor or ringing a bell — the sound of plastic animals slipping down plastic tunnels, the sound of braillers chinking and chunking their impressions and indentations on paper. Sound, when you’re seeking it out, is everywhere. In fact, overwhelmingly so. For us sighted folks, it’s incredible what we’re ignoring on a day-to-day basis because we prefer to listen to the story that our eyes are telling us.

Touch is powerful and important

For sighted people, Touch is a less intuitive way to communicate. Touch is such an intimate, vulnerable sense. Society tells us that we should generally avoid touching anyone else, let alone children. It’s reserved for exclusive relationships — loved ones in particular. As a male I can’t even sit next to an unaccompanied minor on an aeroplane such is the fear in society we have of touch.

But touch is a critical input for kids with vision impairment; more so for kids with no vision at all. I spent a good 20 minutes dancing with a child where physical contact was so crucial to their sense of enjoyment and fun. Vibrating, swaying, and spinning – they’re all such positive things. Feeling momentum, warmth and moisture on skin, the way the breeze picks up and drops locks of hair as the head moves back and forth to the sound of music; it lit these kids up, and for good reason, touch is simply powerful. As sighted humans, I bet we barely notice when it happens to us. I know I don’t.

Taste and Smell are intertwined

Any young child uses their mouth as a primary sensing organ to engage with the world, but they grow out of that quickly as vision takes priority and our parents make us aware of the dangers of putting the wrong thing to our lips. Our noses are one of the most direct lines we have for input into our brain. But again, in the absence of vision, taste and smell become imperative. Fruits and snacks after storytime are a sensory stimulant and, pairing that with sound, provides a starting point for conversations. Kids with impaired vision learn sweet, sour, savoury. As a sighted person, you can see a child eat a strawberry which can begin a conversation about how it feels, what it sounds like to squish it in your mouth, and what it smells like before you swallow.

It makes sense

In the end, the sensory world is rich and diverse. In some ways, for those of us with vision, our ability to see is holding us back from truly experiencing what it’s like to be human. We simply tune-out the other senses. And, we’ve built a world where we prioritise sight over anything, and now we’ve made it difficult and disadvantageous to have any other way of completing many of the rudimentary tasks we need to live a productive, fruitful life.

As humans, we owe it to ourselves to challenge each other when our underlying assumption of vision overrides our decisions. It’ll make a better, more inclusive world, and those of us lucky enough to have working eyeballs may even learn something along the way.

There are very few old-timey painters of Australian landscapes that I swoon over. In fact, Arthur Streeton might be the only one.

I’m a fine art Luddite, ashamedly so. As a child, my parents never entertained activities as ‘high-brow’ as painting, literature or poetry. Who does when you’re busy trying to get food on the table for three kids? But, it did provide the opportunity for me to enter an adult life untainted by early childhood opinions of Monet, Les Murray or Dickens (I think most kids think they’re pretty boring anyway). It also meant that my journey into painting only really started when I myself began painting, as an adult.

In my quest to understand watercolour and how it could be used to brilliant effect, I inevitably followed threads that led me to artists pursuing other media, like Arthur, with oils.

Oil painting, for me right now, is too much effort. I’m far too lazy to deal with the cleaning up. I don’t have enough room, and quite frankly, I don’t like the smell of painting with oil paints. All those solvents and thinners completely remove the joy I find in laying brush to canvas for fun. But boy do I appreciate a fine oil work when I see them.

When I first met Streeton

What I’m about to say may sound insane to anyone with a minute bit of art history knowledge, but I first came across Arthur Streeton’s work in 2017 (I know right?!) I was speaking at The Adelaide Festival of Children’s Books that was hosted at a beautiful heritage property in South Australia called Carrick Hill. While I wandered the grounds and the beautiful historic house that gives Carrick Hill its name, I noticed a flyer for an exhibition of paintings from someone called “Arthur Streeton.” It was happening there the following week. I put it in the back of mind as something I should probably pop back in to see. I like exhibitions anyway, and some of the work on the poster looked nice.

Anyway, the day arrived. I Ubered (is that verb now?) my way to Carrick Hill and paid my entry fee for the exhibition. I cloaked my coat and began to explore. Suffice to say; I was immediately arrested by the colour and light in Arthur’s work.

After a little research, I realised that this Streeton fellow was quite revered. Funny that! I also felt a little stupid, coming to the party so late. But since then, I’ve travelled to galleries in Victoria, NSW and the ACT to seek out Arthur’s work. The thing about seeing photos on the internet is that you don’t get to see the proper colour and light that was painted by the artist, nor the brush strokes that command one’s attention when you’re faced with one of the magnificent works.

As it turns out, our Australian galleries are awash with Streetons. They also contain many paintings by the group of Australian Impressionists which painted alongside him. But none of them could achieve quite what Streeton could.

What is it about Arthur Streeton?

Trapping light so it can’t escape

I don’t know why everyone else seems to like Streeton but what struck me about his work is his bold use of colour for the time. The first painting of his I ever saw, The Blue Mountains, has such a depth of complementary colours, exquisite and delicate use of blues and golds, that it felt as though the light was living in the painting. Artists talk about capturing light, and I often interpret that as recording light. But Streeton actually trapped it in his canvas. They aren’t colours I would have instinctively chosen, but to see them used in this way is incredible. I’ve certainly taken my lessons from viewing Streeton’s original works and introduced some of those ideas in my practice.

That Pink Ochre colour

Streeton also seems to have found the perfect colour mixtures for the soft interplay of granite, soil, and sand in our Australian earth. I can only think of these colours as ‘pink ochre’. It’s a lovely, blushing colour – probably something like Permanent Rose with a dash of Yellow Ochre in it. I’ve used a similar colour in my illustration work for skin (especially either young skin, or ancient skin) and also our dusky sky. But never for rock or earth.

Finally

Whether, like me, you’d never heard of Streeton because you’ve been living in a bubble that didn’t contain any reference to fine art history in Australia, or you’re a fine art aficionado, I think everyone who has tried to paint the Australian landscape will agree that Streeton had something special. It hasn’t been replicated or improved upon since.

You can find his work in the Art Gallery of NSW, the National Gallery of Victoria or the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra… well, at least that’s where I’ve been. You can probably find him all over the place. The man was certainly prolific.

It feels like an epiphany, but it’s quite simple – my day doesn’t have to start with checking email.

For some reason, checking emails in the morning became a habit as part of my day job. I’d get to work, boil the kettle, and make a cup of tea. Then I’d spend the first 30 minutes of everyday clearing the inbox.

There are a few problems with starting the day like this. The main one is that it puts my day firmly out of my control. What I thought I was doing in that first 30 minutes was making a plan for what I was going to achieve that day. And, as I don’t send emails to myself, what it means is that other people are filling my to-do list for me. Once this cycle begins, it means I continually put off the things I want to do or need to get done for me. It gives my time away to those who merely spend a few minutes sending me an email.

So, I stopped.

Yes, that’s right. I stopped checking emails in the morning. And, you know what? The world didn’t cave in. As it turns out, tasks I’m asked to complete when they’re sent to my inbox aren’t that important to the sender. Email seems to have become a way for other people to send me a note asking me to remind them about something they want to talk to me about.

That’s. Crazy.

I’m not some human reminder machine. So when I ignored these emails, what I found was that when they were important, or became urgent, then I’d get a phone call about them. If it’s that critical, then sure, I’ll prioritise it for you. Happy to. Otherwise, I’ve got my own tasks to worry about.

Make in the morning, Plan in the afternoon

Over the years, I’ve discovered that the best time for me to work on crunchy problems is in the morning. It’s when I’m at my most rested; this also means my most creative and imaginative. By starting the day with emails, a generally rudimentary, logical and tedious task, I was losing the opportunity for doing my best work every single day.

So, now I check my emails at the end of the day. It means that I build my to-do list for the next morning at the end of the day and can fill my head with tomorrow’s tasks in advance. My subconscious can already get to work solving tomorrow’s problems while I’m preparing dinner or having a shower. Then, when I wake in the morning, I hit the ground running on problems I’ve already been thinking about (and sometimes, already have the solutions for). I get more done and the quality of the work is far better. It makes everyone happy. Even those people who say they need something ‘urgently’ but they only think to ask for it via email.

It’s a small but profound habit change, for me, and for them. It works.

A curious thing happened to me when I was interviewed by a bookstore not long ago. They asked the question, “What are your influences? Which books did you read growing up?” To which I responded, “As a kid, I never read many books because that’s not the family environment I grew up in. But, I did watch many movies.”

I then went on to list the movies that I feel had a huge influence on me, the ones I watched probably hundreds of times and wore the VHS tape thin in the process.

When I got the edited interview back, we decided to ‘cut’ these bits about movies and focus on the very few books I did read when I was a kid. But it got me thinking, do ‘book people’ think ‘movies’ aren’t legitimate inspiration?

I wouldn’t say I’m a movie buff. A movie buff to me is someone who’s good at movie trivia. Those weird questions like, “Who played Eric in the 1953 production of Eric goes to Broadway?” I don’t know the answers to anything like that. But, I do love movies. I love watching them, unpicking them, analysing how they’re put together and what the director is trying to achieve in doing so. In the end, a movie is a story so why should it be any less legitimate as an ‘influence’ than a book?

The movie language of picture books

I think it’s interesting that whenever I hear very experienced illustrators speak, they talk of picture books like ‘designing a theatre set’. They ask a question on every spread like, “Whose on stage when? Where are they standing? Whose in focus?” etc. I’ve caught myself talking about spreads to my wife with language like, “OK, so, for this shot, we’ll look at Eric from above”… I use the word ‘shot’. Not drawing. Not angle. Not spread. It’s movie language.

Picture books are combinations of words and pictures. Just like movies. I’m convinced that my years spent in front of TV watching movies has given me an intuitive sense of how to set up a ‘shot’. In other words, how to compose an image to do all sorts of things – heighten the drama, show power and dominance, make the viewer feel unbalanced – all those things that movie directors do so well. Some of the best picture book illustrators working today come from a background in film. This isn’t an accident.

So yes, books are wonderful influences, and I’m sure that mentioning them on a bookstore blog is crucial and helpful for promoting sales. But we shouldn’t feel guilty for sitting down and watching a movie once in a while. We learn from other storytellers in many many ways; movies and books are just as good an influence as each other.

There’s only one thing that makes work ‘hard’ for me – any task that I don’t want to do right now.

I love having fun. Who doesn’t right? Doing activities that you enjoy is, pretty much, life’s goal. So Hard Work sucks. But I can’t describe an activity or set of activities that I find consistently hard work. Even the ‘classic’ hard work ones like, ‘doing a million drafts of an illustration’ or ‘answering a million emails’, isn’t hard for me if I haven’t done those things for a while. I enjoy the change.

The problem with describing hard work is that it’s subjective. Take, for example, shovelling cow manure. Now, if I had no choice but to shovel cow manure every single day – the drudgery, the repetition, and let’s be truthful the smell, will eventually get me down. But, if I have to shovel cow manure for a few days at a time because I’m feeding my fruit trees and I want some lovely pears this season, then it’s not “hard” work. It’s just Work.

My mum often tells me that I don’t work as ‘hard’ as my brother. My brother is a plumber, and yes, his job is physically demanding. Often, more physically demanding than mine. But what is hard for him is sitting on a cramped train for an hour a day with complete strangers. It’s consulting with clients, answering emails, and dealing with harsh criticism about work he produces. For him, that’s torturous. But I’m OK with that, most of the time.

I’ll admit it, there are days when I’m sitting in a week full of meetings, really struggling with mental exhaustion and I crave nothing more than to pick up a shovel and spend a few days with nothing but my thoughts while I dig a trench to lay some new drainage pipe.

If hard work is subjective, then knowing what constitutes ‘hard’ for you personally (and when) will be helpful in creating a schedule and a plan for you to avoid it if that’s the goal.

The curious thing about engaging in any work that’s ‘hard’ is that we feel more rewarded when we’ve finished it. Easy work, after all, is easy. So, maybe avoiding hard work isn’t the goal. Hard work, in moderation, can be good for us. What we need to recognise is when it’s hard work, and when it’s just work.

I come from a background in Agile software development which has instilled in me a habit of running small, low-cost experiments to learn new things quickly. I take those new things I learn, and then iterate on their solution until I get something that works just right. It allows me to move quickly and cheaply.

I’ve approached my art career in the same way so far and it’s been working out a treat. I don’t think there’s a better example of this approach than how my studio palette has evolved over the years.

The problem is, I’m a sucker for beautiful art supplies. I’ve lusted for years over a brass studio palette with beautiful big pans and swathes of mixing area.

But every time I think I’m ready to take the plunge and spend around 500GBP (that’s about 1000AUD at the time of writing YIKES), I just can’t imagine moving away from my super flexible, lightweight approach to what I’ve got right now.

My Current Studio Palette

It’s ugly, and probably not going to get too many Instagram likes, but I love it.

My ad-hoc, hacked-together palette has become a core part of my workflow and it’s been with me for 5 years now. It’s ugly, and probably not going to get too many Instagram likes, but I love it.

What’s my palette I hear you ask? It’s quite simply:

• A bunch of regular old watercolour pans (60c each),
• blu-tacked to a small piece of foamcore ($1.20),
• which sits on an ergonomic, 15″ laptop stand ($129 – I’ll explain why I splurged in a minute)

So, for a total of about $144, I’ve got the perfect studio palette. And, until I splurged for the laptop stand, the palette cost was a grand total of $15.

Before the laptop stand, the piece of foam core was glued to an 4×2 block of wood so I could have it an angle. The reason I ‘upgraded’ to a laptop stand was mainly due to the tight space in which I work. I don’t have a fancy, light-filled studio. It’s just my spare room. But the constraint means that I’ve had to think very creatively about how I organise my space.

The wonderful thing about using standard-sized, regular watercolour pans is that when I travel, I can just quickly pluck some very familiar colours from my studio palette and put them in a little travel palette and run out the door. That’s why you can see there are a few colours missing from these photos below. It also proves that yes, there’s nothing fancy, it’s just blu-tac.

Using blu-tac has other advantages too. Not only is it good for travel but it’s also good for experimenting with how I arrange my colours. I’ve iterated on this a number of times too. Do I follow the colour wheel? Do I arrange warm and cool colours together? I can do a complementary colour pair arrangement if I want. In the end, I settled on an arrangement inspired by watercolour artist Jane Blundell. It’s a 3×3 grid of cool/warm/earth and primary colours. As I’ve illustrated more books, I’ve also added some greens and a few other specialty colours over time.

So there you have it. Simple, flexible and maybe not so elegant. In my quest to learn and improve I’m certain that the palette will continue to evolve both in colour choice and how I’ve arranged it. And I’m open to that, when the time is right.

I’m an avid listener of the Plein Air Podcast – a podcast that spends a good hour or so with an individual artist who shares some of their deep insight from a career in art. Yes, it’s decidedly and narrowly American, but there’s some good advice there. And recently, I’ve come to read some of it as bad advice too. One piece in particular.

The host often asks a question like, “We have a lot of beginners in the audience, what’s the one thing you would stress that they learn before anything. What’s the most important thing?” And, nine times out of 10, they say that word – values.

I’m not going to write about what they mean by ‘values’. There has been enough written about what they are and how they work in painting. But, the thing with values is, they’re boring. Well, at least I find them boring.

The classic value exercise is to do grayscales or to paint a picture using one colour (and white). The theory is that you can still make a good painting like this because you’ve still got tonal contrast. I heard one interviewee say something like, “It’s like watching a black and white movie. It has tonal contrast only, there’s no colour, and you can still see what’s going on.”

And yes, I don’t disagree with that. Tonal contrast can make a painting sing. But, what I take issue with is telling beginners to start with the most boring part of painting. Painting is a joyous activity. The feeling of shmooshing a brush or a palette knife through an oily liquid is, for me, a multi-sensory experience like nothing else. I also LOVE colour. I love heaps of colour, all colours, the colour wheel, the brights, the dulls. Making new colours from other colours. All of it. Pasting a surface with a multitude of colour is a visceral experience. Seeing how the thickness of the paint moves, how it changes as it dries, what happens when you go back over it – it’s all part of painting. Does that make a ‘good’ painting? Well, I’ll ask another question, “Who cares?”

Do what feels good and worry about the other stuff later.

If you are a beginner and have found an urge to paint, here’s my advice: Forget values, forget colour theory, forget all the ‘technicalities’. You can sit there and listen to podcast after podcast about what you should or shouldn’t do, attend a million demos from professional artists all who will all give you conflicting advice. But that won’t make you paint. My advice? Just paint. Pick a few cheap colours from the store (maybe start with acrylics because they’re easier to clean up) that make your heart sing. Buy a cheap surface (or you can even use scrap wood like I did my first time), and just start. Do what feels good and worry about the other stuff later.

After you slap your favourite colours all over a surface and the rush of emotion drains away, you’re left with a painting. Chances are that painting is not going to win any awards right away, but that’s OK. What beginners really need is to fall in love with the actual process of painting, not the idea of painting. What will happen is that once you’re done, you’ll think, “Wow, I’m awesome, what a great thing! I can’t believe I made that!”… And then you wake up the next day.

No matter what your experience level with painting, when you awake the next morning and look at yesterday’s mammoth achievement, you’ll find things you don’t like. It might be that the colour is not as bright as you can see in your head. Or that the shape you thought was perfect is actually a little wonky. That’s perfectly normal and, if you’re moved to fix it, well, welcome to a life-long journey in art.

If you feel the urge to ‘fix’ your first painting, go and get another scrap of wood or painting surface and do the same painting again, but with your newly-seen improvements. Keep the first painting forever. Over time, you’ll learn from mistakes. You’ll seek out specific instruction for taking you to the next level. You’ll get to values eventually if you find that you enjoy painting realistic things. If you turn out to enjoy abstract painting, then values don’t matter anyway.

The only advice a beginner needs is to start painting. It’s not the most efficient, cheap or methodical way to getting ‘great paintings’. But, doing this is the quickest way to joining the rest of us painters in a life-long fulfilling addiction to art and learning to see. In the end, that’s the whole point of painting.

I’m looking forward to running a workshop with forty lucky kids as part of the Brimbank Writers’ and Readers’ Festival 2018 in Victoria. It’ll be happening on Saturday, 10 Nov 2018 starting at 2pm.

Here’s the gist:

Do you want your own personal letter from Matt’s CBCA Notable award-winning character, Eric the Postie? Matt will spend this session guiding children and parents in the lost art of letter writing (one of Eric’s favourite activities ever!)

Kids will end the session by ‘posting’ their own letter to Eric. Then, a few weeks later, Eric will send individual letters out with a personal reply! All replies include a Wattleford Post letterhead, a signature of Eric, all hand-typed on a typewriter. Parents and children will be notified when they can collect their letters from Deer Park library a week or so after the event.

For more information and to reserve your place, visit the Brimbank Writers’ and Readers’ Festival website.