View over The Minch with the Uist Islands peeking over the horizon, settled in their misty shroud.
(Charcoal Landscape from Lochbay, Waternish, Isle of Skye – what3words location: avid.printer.tightest)
The Sketchbook Project is the world’s largest collection of artist sketchbooks and is housed in Brooklyn, New York. Many are digitised and available to view from wherever you are, and the actual sketchbooks are often taken around the States on tour of educational establishments. Continuing from my first sketchbook (Fairy Bridge to Lochbay), I’ve started from Lochbay and am sketching from the passing places along the single-track road leading to Stein and Dunhallin. Each location is noted with the what3words app, and you can see the location of today’s sketch above).
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The islands are sleepily emerging as the morning mist rises. They’re not ready to rise and shine yet, it’s more of a duvet day for these.
(Charcoal landscape from Lochbay, Waternish, Isle of Skye – what3words location: intent.unloads.bolts)
The Sketchbook Project is the world’s largest collection of artist sketchbooks and is housed in Brooklyn, New York. Many are digitised and available to view from wherever you are, and the actual sketchbooks are often taken around the States on tour of educational establishments. Continuing from my first sketchbook (Fairy Bridge to Lochbay), I’ve started from Lochbay and am sketching from the passing places along the single-track road leading to Stein and Dunhallin. Each location is noted with the what3words app, and you can see the location of today’s sketch above.
(if you’d like to have my blog posts appear magically in your inbox, just sign up with ‘bloglovin’ here and they’ll do the magic for you)
In the spring, before the midges hatched and inspired by Louise Fletcher on the Art Juice podcast, I registered with The Sketchbook Project.
The Sketchbook Project is the world’s largest collection of artist sketchbooks and is housed in Brooklyn, New York. Many are digitised and available to view from wherever you are, and the actual sketchbooks are often taken around the States on tour of educational establishments.
An A6(ish) sized sketchbook arrived and I set about filling it. I’ve been trying to get my own sketching inspirations of the local views around Skye sorted out for ages and thought this would be a fabulous chance to really get going. I wanted to draw Skye from an incredibly slow, ground-based view though. The main landmarks and sights may come into it eventually, but for now, I’ve settled on the passing spaces along the B886 single track road from the Fairy Bridge into Lochbay (the first area you reach as you enter the Waternish peninsula where I live on the Isle of Skye).
I kept track of each location with the what3words app and set about cycling off to the Fairy Bridge to draw my first sketch. It took a few attempts, as my bike took a while to get the hang of my natural accident-proneness but I gathered the first ten or so sketches during a particularly sunny fortnight. The last sketches were drawn after my knee injury, and I’m incredibly grateful to my neighbour for driving me to the planned passing spaces, ably manhandling me and my crutches so that I could get the last drawings for the sketchbook finished.
So here they are, my first sketching series from Skye. I’m about to post the sketchbook off to the States, and it’ll be available to view in The Brooklyn Art Library and online when it’s been processed. You can see the numbered sketches and their what3words locations below:
- clockwork.mouse.twinge
- typed.posts.birthing
- homing.used.diver
- detective.tourist.guises
- primary.clotting.subject
- wasps.blotting.plots
- soggy.ranks.limbs
- winds.mason.quoted
- animated.reviews.squabbles
- fermented.swatting.love
- insisting.snow.pothole
- shuffles.degree.feasting
- less.cashier.beads
- abstracts.forgiving.taker
- hopefully.exist.cheater
- partner.months.stews
The sun was out, the sea was sparkling and the beauty of the highlands was clear for all to see as I sketched from the GALE Centre in Gairloch last weekend. I have an exhibition there during this month and I love the chance to meet some of the visitors (the cake is also marvellous if you have the chance to pop in and treat yourself). It was also great to be able to gaze through charcoal at Skye and Rona from their eastern sides rather than being on the islands themselves.
So I now have a highland sketchbook as well as a Skye one (you could call it an excuse to collect stationery but I’m calling it a necessary item as part of the project) in my midst! How lovely! I’m appreciating the ring-bound ‘sketch and store’ sketchbook by Derwent at the moment. I like to put a piece of glassine paper between the pages to protect the drawing and its a great way to hold everything all in the same place.
PS: There’s still chance to see the exhibition if you’re in or near Gairloch before the 26th May, the details are below:
I’ve been dreaming of doing this for years, and last Sunday I finally got round to it – doing a series of charcoal sketches from the roads and lovely scenic spots around Skye. I watched Brené Brown’s new talk on Netflix ‘The Call to Courage’, choose ‘courage over comfort’ and got myself out with the sketchbook.
You see, I don’t have a problem particularly with people seeing or watching me draw/paint, it was the fact that this tiny idea of a potentially enormous project would actually start when I made it. It would mean that I had committed to potentially sketching from every layby and every sight on this island, other islands and the rest of the Highlands (not unusually, my sights and ideas have escalated exponentially since I first had the inkling). That’s huge by anyone’s standards isn’t it? So, I took a took a starting step and went to nearby Dunvegan Castle to begin – here before (well, at the top of the page a you are the first two sketches of the series that has been dwelling in my head for quite some time.
The weather was clement (although distinctively breezy on the Lochside, unsurprisingly), the midges hadn’t hatched and it was lovely to at least begin something that had been brewing for so long. Like any release of energy, lots of new ideas also seeped in: there are lots of beautiful tulips and rhododendrons currently in bloom that swept through my unsuspecting imagination. So my brain leapt from monochrome to vivid colours – typical! Maybe next spring for those, but it was so fabulous to be out and about doing what I love most.
(Both sketches are in charcoal)
