The Keeper's Cottage

For about a month now I've been working on the biggest drawing I've attempted in a long time. I wanted it to reach to the very edges as if it was continuing on and today I finally completed it. It's been pretty tough going but I really wanted to challenge myself and try and include as much detail as possible. 

The drawing is of a cottage in Glencoe which I've loved since I was a little girl.  The mountains stretch up behind it creating a stunning, detailed backdrop of rocks and foliage.  There are many streams and waterfalls dotted across its surface along with old wooden fences trailing up and out of sight. I really wanted to capture all this on paper and I've wanted to draw this mountainside for a very long time. I'm glad I've finally done it. I did have a practice run a few months back so I knew that the task ahead was going to be massive but I'm incredibly pleased that I've accomplished it.

So this is how it all began and you can see the scale here next to my fingers.  A tiny little cottage. I think this part was the most nerve wracking as I knew that once I'd tackled the cottage and got it looking the way I wanted it to, the rest would flow from there.

The drawing itself is A3 in size so there was a lot of paper to cover compared to what I usually work on.  Most of my drawings float in the middle of the paper as well so it was new to me to keep drawing to the very edges.  It made it quite a daunting task at the beginning.

Progress was very slow and I had to keep pausing as my hand was seizing up. The mark making was so small that my hand was hardly moving so after a while it got a bit painful! It was best to draw for about twenty minutes and then rest.

It was exciting to see the sheer scale of the mountains take shape behind the small cottage. I tended to work on one area for a time and then jump across to another area.  It would get quite tiring on my eyes to concentrate on the same group of shapes so it helped to look at a completely different section and start afresh.

Falling ill for a week halted progress right at the end so this last corner stayed the same for about a week. That was pretty nerve-wracking when I needed to get it finished. Thankfully I was able to catch up and it is now the complete drawing that you can see at the top of the post.

I've entered it into the RSA Open Exhibition 2016 and I find out if it's made the next stage on June the 13th so we shall wait and see! Even if it doesn't I'm just really pleased to have completed this as it was a challenge that I set myself and I did it.

Painting tiny houses and updating drawings

If I get even just one day a week when I complete some drawings or fix something on my website then I'm happy. Thankfully today has been one of those days! I experimented with some acrylic paint on one of the pieces of ceramic I found of Broughty Ferry beach. Just a simple street design with my favourite colour combinations. It's certainly given me some ideas, so I better get finding more ceramics soon.  

I also managed to complete four drawing clean ups which is a bit of a record for one day. The drawings were rescanned at a high resolution and cleaned up to look as close to the original as possible. They've come out a lot sharper than those I had before and it's been a large chunk out of my list I'm working through at the moment.  Bit by bit my website is looking more like the way I've been hoping for. You can have a look if you like at www.sannadyker.com 

All my drawings have stories behind them. The story usually just pops into my head while I'm doing the drawing. Other times it takes a little longer.  It just depends on the drawing.  Most of the pieces on my website have their own stories and I've included the drawings that I finished today, each with their own stories. 

'He said it was his friend. We wanted to explain to him it was just a dead fish but we knew he'd forget about it by the evening. He sat on the beach and explained to it that he was going to come and visit its house and family. The fish lay limp in his hands still and unanswering. By late afternoon he was trying to feed it part of his picnic, by which point the fish was looking a bit worse for wear and the sun was causing it to send off quite an odor. When we tried to get him to leave the fish he got rather defensive as he sometimes does and ran off with it saying that he needed to get it ready to go home. He had done similar with other objects he'd found on days out but I wish we'd paid closer attention on that day. I wish we'd listened.

He left his vest and jeans on the beach in a crumpled heap and a scrawled hand written note saying 'Away to fish home, i luv you'. We never saw my brother again.'

'He met Elvis once.

Elvis bumped into him on the street.

He told Elvis to watch where he was going in the future.'

 'She left him after it had been going on for a year. He had managed to keep it a secret but one day she heard the noises and went to investigate. 

Her husband was making thimbles into small bells. 

He had tried to keep it from his wife as she suffered intense migraines and knew their sound would cause her more pain but as his obsession grew he found it hard not to ring his completed objects and hear their sweet sound.

He painstakingly carved out the most ornate designs into their surface. Most of them came from charity shops and he was able to re-sculpt the inner sides to make them ring as though they were made for angels. It was a talent he never knew he had and the more he made the more time he spent sitting ringing them, louder and louder, more and more.

She had to leave as her head felt as though it may explode, the beautifully agonising sound rang through her house from day into night.

On the day she left, he gave her a kiss on the cheek, and handed her the most beautiful bell he'd ever made, inside no clapper was to be found.'

'For some of us it will come down to that one person at the end. When all others have gone, partners, family, pets, there will be that one person that won't have lived your life with you but will listen to you patiently about your experiences. This is Margaret and Tabitha. They are neighbours. Margaret was there for Tabitha when Fred died. Tabitha knows all about Margaret's only love who died in a car accident when she was only 20. He was 21. Tabitha told Margaret the details of her youth living in France. The romances, the heartache, the day she met Fred. Margaret told Tabitha of her devotion to greyhounds, her love of pickled eggs and her mother who sang like an angel. Everyday they meet. They drink tea and they tell their stories. No one else will hear them again and so they pour their hearts out, discussing year after year over cups of tea full of milk, heaps of sugar and a few tears.'

Parcels, drawings and books

I have taken part in Oh Comely's Perfect Strangers project again.  The project is a pretty simple but fun idea where you get paired up with someone else from the project and send each other a parcel in the post. My swap partner mentioned that she liked Wes Anderson films and Amelie so I tried to create a box that sort of looked like something from them.  I've included some books, drawings, postcards, knitted and felted animals, ornaments and other nice bits and bobs.  I hope she likes it! 

I've also been spending some time looking about Broughty Ferry beach for pieces of old ceramic that's been washed up.  I'm hoping to do some paintings on some of them.  I'm not too sure what I'm doing with the pattered ones but I just like collecting them because they look nice. There's also a few interesting stones in there too that I decided to keep.

In terms of drawing I'm fitting it into my spare time as much as I can. I recently watched the film 'Her' with Joaquin Phoenix as the main character Theodore Twombly.  A film set sometime in the future but certainly not unreachable from our current advances in technology. It's story of a guy, Theodore,  who's going through a divorce, during which he gets the latest operating system.  A not so remarkable thing to do since we always seem to be updating our devices these days.  This operating system is like the next step of Siri in which you speak to it and it answers but unlike previous versions that sound quite robotic, this update is just like talking to a real person. In such a lonely period of his life it's a welcoming, if a bit strange, new relationship that evolves throughout the film. I loved the colour scheme and the whole feeling of the film which was quite melancholy, slightly detached from how we live now but also frighteningly close. So after enjoying it so much I decided to do a drawing of Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore. 

I also recently watched The Grand Budapest Hotel by Wes Anderson. I found out that he was influenced by the writer Stefan Zweig and that the film was inspired by two of his books, one being 'Beware of Pity'.  I decided to give it a read and it was like reading a big collection of strong emotions.  There was no subtlety in the way the characters acted, everything was very dramatic and full of a great deal of over thinking. The story is about a young lieutenant Anton Hofmiller who is invited up to the nearby castle owned by an aristocrat Lajos Kekesfalva.  After having such an incredible evening full of drinking, eating and dancing he makes an incredibly embarrassing mistake asking the daughter of the house to dance, not knowing that she is paralysed. Consumed by his shame he experiences true pity for the first time and becomes a slave to this overwhelming pity he feels for the girl which becomes more and more suffocating as the story goes on. It doesn't read at all like a Wes Anderson film but you can see that certain characters or scenes influence The Grand Budapest Hotel.  The story itself stands on it's own as a tale of inner turmoil and despair. Now I've moved onto the newest book by Haruki Murakami, 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki' which is proving to draw me in already and I'm only on chapter two. 

I'm off on holiday soon, camping on the west coast of Scotland.  I have a brand new sketchbook ready as well as a list of books I'm planning to take.  I'll be away for two weeks and I can't wait for a break away. 

A week of reading

This week has been a very sleepy one but I've not been the only one.  It seems a lot of people have been feeling a bit lethargic this week so perhaps there's something going about.
Thankfully though I've had a series of books to nestle into which has been my main activity this week.
Ben Aaronovitch has written a series of books following the life of PC Peter Grant.  A young policeman in London who discovers that there is more to policing than meets the eye. After meeting a ghost face to face in the first book 'Rivers of London', he is taken on as an apprentice by Detective Police Inspector Thomas Nightingale, head of The Folly that deals with the supernatural and magic side of things that occur for the Metropolitan police to deal with. Nightingale also happens to be the last sanctioned wizard in England and Peter is the first apprentice in over seventy years to be taken on. If you like ghost stories and the paranormal, which I always have done, then these books would be right up your street. I'm now on the fourth book in the series 'Broken Homes'.  They are a perfect companion for the bus journey to and from work everyday.
This week has also brought with it the next Oh Comely magazine issue. Perfect for curling up with a cup of tea, Oh Comely is full of inspiring stories, beautiful illustrations and photography, tasty recipes and crafty ideas. This issues theme is weather and I'm looking forward to settling down to read it this coming week.
I also got a delivery of more Fabriano Venezia sketchbooks. I keep talking about these but they really are my favourite so I got a few more to stock up.
Finally I've been continuing to look back at previous work. I really do recommend it as it gives you new ideas and you can pick out what you were happy with and what to improve on.  It's also always nice to take a walk down drawing memory lane.

Working through a mountain of drawings

Over the past week I've been back at work and spending what little time I have in the evenings working on this lot. I only have about two hours to do anything other than eat, shower and then sleep as I have to get up quite early the next day. 

This is my drawing stash, or some of it, and I'm currently working through it all, scanning and then cleaning up in Photoshop.  My main reason is because I'm wanting to produce prints and other products but over the years I've lost my original scans or larger files.  

So I've started the long task of creating good quality files to work from.  I'm also going to slowly update the images on my website as some of them aren't the best.  I've noticed that more since getting my new Macbook.  I'm not sure what's going on there, perhaps its pro retina display shows it up, but I want to be showing the best quality I can.

Bit by bit I'm cleaning in-between pencil lines, taking away the grain from the paper and generally making my drawings web and print worthy. I got a Wacom Intuos Pen and Touch tablet when I got my new Mac and it's been incredibly helpful when working in detail. As you can see on the drawing below, I've just started on the tip of his nose. 

I've started with some pretty difficult and time consuming pieces which are in pencil and biro. Both drawings below needed a lot of work to get to a stage which I'm happy with. They are also both small drawings originally so it was quite difficult to keep them at a good quality. The original files of these are really large which was exactly what I was looking to keep a copy of. So the scanning and cleaning continues and then eventually that will result in some prints for sale, hooray! 

I also had a go at doing a self portrait today but it came out a little terrifying so I'll leave that one for the bin I think and instead leave you with two tidied drawings.