The nice thing about the little, tiny one liners of Keri Smith’s is that there is a lot of room to play about with them. The starter is so small that it leaves a lot to the imagination. I have boiled them down even more in my sketchbook list and I am not using the original book at all and I am using any size paper I can find up to about A3 or so and I am just slinging them into a folder to worry about later.

The first thing I have to imagine is how to facilitate the idea. How big a piece of paper? what materials can I find? What sort of paint or pen or whatever?

One of the activities is to draw ten second drawings in a grid. I have dispensed with her grids so I have to make my own which I do by folding paper into squares. i started off trying to count ten seconds but quickly got fed up with that and just went with the flow; a few heart beats each, don’t sweat it, with a rough brush and some thick black paint. These were nice to do, theme and variation, not much room in each square to muck about, simple glyphs. I did a couple with tea marks first and then black paint and then I left the black paint off and then I combined three ideas by staining then putting a bit of a drawing down with glue and then a glyph.

I was doing these today in odd moments as I pottered about in non contacts, doing a bit of paper work whilst the tea dried, all very quick to do. before I left at the end of the day I couldn’t resist painting glyphs on top of the glue and tea with some thick acrylic. As I packed my bag to leave I realised that the black paint was drying differently over the glue and sort of creeping off it whilst settling into the paper. The paint was making the clear PVA glue visible whilst also obscuring it.

I though this is so much what it is about. Attention to materials, experimenting, combining and recombining, thinking and not thinking, improvising. A rather lovely little moment of delight in seeing how paint dries.

What I have to do is get this across to the pupils as I don’t think they are thinking like this at all. It is all ‘having an idea’. What I have to do is get them to play around more and, as far as these examples go, I need to develop some into some more finished pieces or ‘final outcome(s)’ as they are called in GCSE speak. Basically do something bigger or put them together so they appear to be more than they are.

Smith doesn’t go beyond the interesting set of sketches which is interesting. The little events are apparently enough in themselves which is fair enough, they are. Or perhaps the idea is that one does the events and are so taken up in the creative flow that the next thing and the next thing just happen naturally. Or does that only happen to artists? Or if that does happen to you then you are an artist?