One of the things I am best at is definitely colouring in. I know this because Otter Keeper is always really impressed whenever I show him anything I’ve done. Colouring in is like reading, it can be REALLY hard, but the more you practice the better you get. Me and Teddy try to aim for a minimum of 2 to 3 hours of colouring in each day. When I’m bigger I might be a professional “colourer in”, then I’d get to colour really important things like maps… or adverts.

Anyway the other day something happened that had never happened before. We were busy colouring a page from our favourite colouring book… it was quite a complex picture (Teddy couldn’t help and was just watching) when all of a sudden we ran out of colours! We had actually used them all! Someone who isn’t very experienced at colouring in would probably give up and get quite frustrated at this point. But instead, I had the best idea ever! Me and Teddy would just invent a new colour.

We ran the idea by Otter Keeper (we like to do this, as sometimes he has been known to give useful advice) but NOT today. He said it was ‘impossible to invent a new colour Otter’ as they had already all been invented. How silly of him, that’s probably what they said to the person who invented fluorescent highlighters before they existed. Fluorescent colours are magic – even Otter Keeper can’t explain them and he can explain almost anything.

We started off with our paints and mixed the red with the blue, this gave us purple which was a great start. We then mixed in some yellow which made a brownish type of colour which was also very promising. Me and Teddy both felt this brown was a really good brown. We tried mixing more colours and the brown changed to a slightly different brown. We realised we were really quite good at making browns.

After a long time mixing we got a bit bored of making browns. It was then that Teddy cleverly suggested we needed to “think outside of the box”. This is what Otter Keeper says sometimes when he’s trying to think of a solution to a difficult problem (It’s also a good thing to say if you’re making a secret den inside a cardboard box and get stuck thinking what to do next).

After a while of thinking outside of the box we realised it didn’t really help. However seeing as we’d been thinking about boxes we decided to leave the new colour till another day and transfer our efforts into making a spaceship out of an old shoebox . Otter Keeper gave it to us last week and me and Teddy have been wondering what to do with it for a while. If you’re having trouble mixing a new colour, making a spaceship is a particularly good thing to do instead.

I’ll probably be tied up with my spaceship project for a while now. Teddy says he will try and find time to continue work on our new colour next week (I think he feels a bit guilty because he made several bad decisions during the mixing process – technically it’s mostly his fault we didn’t discover a new colour).

Have a look at my Otter website www.iamotter.co.uk