Five things to make with your hands on an afternoon

You don't need to know what you're going to make before you arrive. But if a starting point helps, here are five.

1. Make a clay sphere

It's the simplest thing in the world and it's surprisingly satisfying. Take a piece of clay the size of an orange. Work it between your palms in circular movements for five minutes. The idea isn't a perfect sphere — it's your sphere, with the marks your hands leave. You can let it dry. You can squash it and start again. You can score it with a toothpick. Clay is on the table on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays.

2. Copy something you like

Bring an image — a photo on your phone, a page from a book, a leaf you picked up on the way. Try to reproduce it in pencil or charcoal. It doesn't matter if it looks like the original. The act of looking carefully at something and trying to put it on paper changes the way you see. An hour of careful copying tells you more about how light works than a year of theory.

3. Make a one-page book

Fold an A4 sheet in half, then in half again, then in half once more. Open it. You have eight sections. Use each section for a different thing: a word, a mark, a colour, a shape. It doesn't have to make sense as a whole. It's an exploration with borders.

4. Mix colours until you run out of paper

Take the watercolour. Mix. Not to make a specific colour, but to see what happens when you put two tones together. Keep each mix in a corner of the paper. Make another. Cover the paper with patches of colour. At the end you have a chromatic map of what you did that afternoon.

5. Write a sentence and illustrate it

You don't have to be a writer. Take any sentence — something you heard, something you thought on the way here — and write it in the centre of a sheet. Then decorate around it. With whatever you want: ink, graphite, tiny bits of clay in the corners. The sentence can be unremarkable. What matters is the time you spend with it.

None of these things has a right result. They all start with hands touching materials. That's why they work.