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My current Sushi Sketchbook,
Saints and Serpents shouldn't really have taken so long
to put together. The basis of it is a 6 x 6 inch sketchbook (left)
of drawings I made in May but I've also included two watercolours
from an A4 sketchbook that I took with me the previous year when
we spent a week at the same location, Edingthorpe, east Norfolk.
The trouble is that I find it hard to leave the text as straightforward
descriptions captions. I want to try and put in some of the thoughts
and feelings I had when I was there on the beach, in the Old Rectory
garden and in the medieval church of All Saints. This is perhaps
putting too much into a slim volume of sketches and I look forward
to writing a more straightforward Sushi which is full of
incident, with less room for convoluted trains of thought.
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 This
is the way I've been working:
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writing the text by hand
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scanning it
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putting it into a mock-up version (black text, right) which
I then print
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reading it through and editing and improving it (blue text, right)
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. . . writing it out again . . .
The final booklet will be approximately 6 x 6 inches so that the drawings
can be shown in their original format, same size. I print it on A4 in
black and white so that I've space to make corrections. The pagination
is also easier to handle than in the final 12 x 18 inch, 6 pages per sheet
format which will be in colour and black and white.
Cabin Fever
All this explains why natural history observation has been missing in
this nature diary recently and why yesterday I found myself closely observing
a patch of condensation in one of my breaks between writing. 
Richard Bell, richard@willowisland.co.uk
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