I’ve started this year with a craving to experiment more with non-digital artwork, and it’s been a great pleasure spreading out tubes of goache, colourful inks and tiny watercolour pans. I’m even trying working without black lines – for these two lions I used orange waterproof ink, then used a mix of watercolour, goache and coloured pencil, and finished by adding some texture with a home-made rubber stamp. I like the way it’s not too polished.

Thinking about lions reminded me of something in one of the ‘Reginald Perrin’ books by David Nobbs, which I read many many years ago…for some reason I never forgot a scene where Reggie had gone to a safari park with his grandchildren, and one of them looked at the lions and asked “Why are lines lines?”. It amused me then and it still does, something about the complete un-answerability of it, the funny phonetics, and the fact that it’s actually such a good question.