Cardboard fish, realised.

*

Fish, above, made into cardboard manquettes from the designs of yesterday's doodle

.

The figurine is there to show how the pieces might scale as playground sculptures. The clean shapes have something of the quality of tin-plate toys, and the next thing might be to experiment with painting these in the sort of bright patterns that colour such tin-plate toys.

The trick is in treading that line between the mimetic and the fully abstract: if the fish are too realistic, like Britain's toys, then they lack a certain mystery, because they fail to engage the imagination. If they are wholly abstract, they simply become as building blocks, and would inspire only the most imaginative.

*