I do enjoy working at 210 x 150mm. I used to think it was A5, 210 x 148.5mm, which is a conventional sketch-book size, but soon discovered that the extra 1.5mm of the boards supplied by the Open Eye Gallery looked wrong with an A5 drawing mounted on them. The beauty of small scale work is that tiny elements make a huge difference, which is great for my kind of mark-making; the merest stroke of the pen, the texture of a line, each grainy smudge, and the paper itself assume a significance which is often lost in a larger work.
This year I worked on paper sheets cut just slightly larger than the gallery boards, keeping them in a zipped folder acting as a drawing-board as well as safe transport for working on the move. Once the boards had arrived from the gallery I drew around them in pencil and carefully trimmed the drawings to the right size, which worked perfectly, in spite of my fears of cutting into the mount board and making wonky, torn edges. I thought it would be a good idea to work this way in future instead of using sketch-pads; I can dip in and out of drawings on interesting papers, and amass a collection of drawings all the same size. By next year, if I am invited to submit work to On a Small Scale again, I should have a good selection to choose from (just remember to buy some nice new sharp scalpel blades for trimming!)