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I had a straight afternoon in the park with my sketchpad – work in progress, a4:

The letter ‘g’ is not what you think it is.

When I was learning calligraphy, ‘g’ was one* of the stranger things I had to wrap my head around. Why does it curve like that? Nobody knows! It lurks in texts, an ambiguous little sound waiting to catch me out as my tired paws stick the belly curve on the wrong way round again. And then it finally makes its counter-intuitive way into your muscle memory, and I can start playing with it, and now that bizarre little loopy thing is one of my favourite letters, having two ends that can turn into great glorious flourishes or subtle little interlinks depending on the mood the pen is in.

*The real strangest thing about calligraphy is that you end up having favourite letters, which is both a sign of a troubled mind and a subject for another day.

It’s World Poetry Day, and some of my most memorable commissions are for hand-written poetry – here’s one from last summer, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18:

Written at 12″ x 16″ size, freehand.

If you’ve somehow missed this, you need it:

This is a seriously dedicated long post by Josh McPhee on classic Penguin crime covers from the sixties, which of course I’m going to have to riff on heavily this week.