Exercise 1 Temporary patterns

Frankly, this warm-up exercise put the frighteners on me so much as to induce brain-freeze. No pencils, no paper, nothing familiar at all about making patterns that disappear in a moment. Why is that alarming? Well, just because, that’s why. The solution was to jump headlong into it*, preferably before I had my eyes open and while that lump of cells in my skull was still chugging along in one of its sleep rhythms, hence this is the most domestic of pattern sets – the breakfast routine.

The first, strictly speaking, was not made by me, but I’m going to claim it because that effervescent vitamin C tablet didn’t get into that water on its own.  All that energy, that isn’t hot mud or larva, contained in a blue plastic picnic mug. So begins my day.

I did make this. My cats emerge from the front room in strict order, each of them pretending they don’t want breakfast until another stops at a dish. So I string them out like planetary moons and wait as each traps a cat in its gravity well. Ten minutes later, those moons are under water in the washing up bowl.

This makes me feel a bit queasy and I’ve discovered that porridge is really best observed through a fog, if at all! The blueberries swirl nicely but in this instance, didn’t leave any blue colour in the substance of the mixture.

I wish I could post the slo-mo video I made of this properly cosmic black-hole-in-a-mug. There are swirls of colliding galaxies and remnants of stars in there, and even the pattern on the sides of the mug are reminiscent of that mad star dash in 2001: a Space Odyssey. Not sure I’ll look at my coffee in quite the same way again.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll recruit the fish in the pond as they’re still quite excited by food appearing on the surface.

*with a welcome shove from the Drawing Skills Facebook group for which I’m very grateful.