I have something slightly different as an image for today, a documentation photo from the early stages of the new piece which I am working on. It is of course another piece in the project which I am doing under the working title of the  Mary’s Table Series. At the moment the piece is still very much in the planning stage, as you can see I am thinking of varying the structure of the pencil block from the first one which I built; I am looking at using to different colours of pencils and at sloping them at approximately 45° to mimic the actual angle at which a person holds a pencil; I did some research on this yesterday, (yes I can be that “geeky” sometimes! And yes even that information is available off the internet) and it turns out that the average is, as expected 45°. of course the main difference between this and the first piece in the series is that these are the kinds of pencils which have erasers on the ends; this actually has quite a large and interesting effect on the block. Because of the addition of the metal feral which hold the eraser in place, that end of the pencil is slightly wider than the other end, this difference is only tiny but with the accumulation of the pencils into a block it becomes more significant. This changes the shape of the block from a parallelogram to a trapezium, meaning that the angles at each end are different. I like this about the piece, it speaks to that individuality of different people with different pencils; the average may be 45°, but that is only an average.

My final comments for today are about the importance of they taking of this kind of documentary photo, for me it is the same as keeping notes in a sketchbook. they are an aid to thinking and planning;  hopefully, they save time and mistakes later during the construction phase.But they are more than this, they can become “artifacts” in their own right, sometimes they can be just for future reference but sometimes they become or start a piece in themselves.