Quentin Blake, Words and Pictures, 2000The other discovery was that there wasn't, after all, such a need to be anxious about mistakes (at least with black and white printing – I hadn't yet found my way into colour) and if I made a blot I could get some process white and paint it out. And not only that; I discovered that if necessary you could do an extra bit of drawing and stick it on and when it was printed it didn't show. For a while my drawings developed into a sort of collage of cut-out pieces of paper while I tried to get the very best result. (Once or twice I even found myself with a dot for an eye on a tiny scrap of paper, moving it around with a pin to get the best expression.) But this wasn't the main advantage, which was that now I could feel relaxed about producing a drawing and, curiously enough, if you are more relaxed you can concentrate better, you are able to focus your mind on exactly what is happening in front of you, the scene that you are imagining in your mind and living through the pen you are holding in your hand. I began to enjoy the scratchiness and fluency of the nib as it instinctively searched out what I was trying to draw. My drawing became what my friend the French illustrator Philippe Dumas described as "une écriture" – a sort of handwriting.