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This sketch was prompted by a pile of collage paper scraps and some interesting shapes that I'd cut out from my printmaking dump sheets and then overprinted. I thought I’d see how far I could go with just collage pieces to get started this time, before the urge to add paint got the better of me. It was looking a bit garbled to begin with, but at the start I was really just thinking about covering up the white paper.

With visitors coming and going over the past few days, it's no surprise that I've been feeling a change to the energy in my studio space. And this has got me thinking about my connection to my space and my creativity - particularly my apparent need to undertake a creative act on a daily basis!

"What inspires you?" This is a question I'm preparing myself for, with this year's Noosa Open Studios nearly upon us! It's a question I ask myself on a daily basis. I could give you a hundred answers that include everything from sweeping landscapes and fallen leaves to emotional experiences and waste cardboard packaging. But that doesn't make me sound very focused.... which I admit sometimes feel I ought to be.

My sketches have taken a bit of a back seat this month with all my time and energy going into finishing my bigger paintings. But I've had 'muted colour' on my mind as we've been working our way through various colour exercises at the Tinbeerwah Art Group. So with some paint leftover on my palette I decided to ask myself, what happens if I mute or de-saturate all the colours in a sketch?

I'm still adding to my growing collection of colour sketches on paper. I started to see organic shapes in this sketch from the very beginning which informed the way it turned out! A fair bit of colour play without any particular direction in mind beyond starting with blue, pinks and a green.

I had another go at starting with a black background with this little 30 x 30 cm canvas board along with pieces of bright collage paper, some of which had found their way into the early layers of my bigger paintings. Most of the little cutout circles and semi-circles were ones I had lying around, leftover from previous snippings, so I was really just using up what I had to hand.