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Illustrator

Sketches from Devon and Cornwall

Joel and I spent two weeks in the Devon and Cornwall area of England recently. We had excellent weather for plein air sketching. Words can’t describe how inspiring I find the landscape in those parts. Lovely! That’s all I can say. I especially love Dartmoor National Park.

These sketches are available as prints in my Etsy shop.

This is a view of Dittisham, in the south of Devon. We took a tiny “ferry” boat to go over to Greenway from here (Agatha Christie’s summer home). I highly recommend the experience to everyone. It was a beautiful day, ideal for sketching. I was sitting in the churchyard while sketching this.

While in Devon, we stayed in Dartmoor National Park near Dunsford. We sketched this house, name the Olde Court Farm in Dunsford. The owners informed us the house is over 700 years old! That is madness to my Canadian ears. The owners were such lovely people, they served us mint tea (from her garden) and delicious cake while we were sketching! It does not get better than that.

Our AirBnB was across from the Teign River and these old stepping stones (the Old Stables on AirBnB, check it out). We decided to paint them one day. It was very relaxing to wake up to the sounds of running water. You could cross the stones to get to a network of walking paths on the other side.

This was sketched on a drizzly day in Lustleigh, in the Dartmoor Park. I like how much the cottage is leaning (not an exaggeration, I measured). I like what the rain did to the sky and pavement part of the sketch. There is a fantastic tea room next door, The Primrose Tea Room, where I had one of the best afternoon teas of my life.

This is a view from the harbour of Porthoustock in Cornwall. We started drawing this at around 7pm so it was pretty quiet there. Of all my sketches with boats in them, this is the only one that turned out. I’ve since given up drawing boats and put them in the same category as drawing cars, i.e. unpleasant things to draw.

Ah, the Tin Coast in Cornwall. Another great day for sketching. If you’ve watched Poldark like I have (and are mildly obsessed with it) then you will recognize these chimneys. They are all over the coast in this area of Cornwall. This was at the Levant Mine complex, an old tin mine ruin.

 

 

Portraits for Commercial Observer

I was fortunate enough to be chosen by the Commercial Observer this past fall to illustrate 39 portraits of real estate bigwigs for their Owners Magazine. It was a lot of work and a tight deadline, but I’m very happy with how they turned out. I worked flat out for two weeks, day and night and weekends.

At one point my drafting table looked like this:

 

And here are the final portraits:

And don’t they look lovely in the spread!

 

Plein air sketches from Ireland

Joel and I are back from a 3-week trip to Ireland. We rented a car and drove around the country as far north as Co. Sligo but didn’t have time to make it to Northern Ireland (there is a LOT to see in Ireland). It was fabulous! We saw and did so many things I can’t quite remember it all. When Joel and I roadtrip, we roadtrip hard. We had beautiful weather, a heat wave in fact, and only two days of rain…so it was perfect for sketching!

I feel like I need to say this somewhere and since I’m not active on social media, I’ll say it here: please don’t go on bus tours. Ireland’s tiny roads are literally clogged with massive tour buses who are dropping thousands people off at sites, turning them into circuses. Those sites are not meant to accommodate that many people at the same time. Go on a small tour with a van-full of people…not a giant tour bus. Or better yet, rent a car! You get a much more authentic experience than the pre-packaged tours. Driving on the other side of the road is not that hard, you get used to it.

And now on to the sketches:

The Superintendent’s Lodge in St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Our first sketch of the trip.

The round tower at Glendalough Monastery in Co. Wicklow. There are hundreds of these thousand-year-old towers all around Ireland, many of them still standing like this one. You can’t go in because the door is 10 ft from the ground, so they would have needed a ladder to get in. Fun fact, I lost my nose ring in the long grass while sketching this (don’t ask).

Blarney Castle, Co. Cork. Jam-packed with American tourists, but worth seeing nonetheless. It’s a very picturesque ruin and the gardens are amazing.

Poulnabrone Dolmen in the Burren. I realized as I was sketching this that I’ve drawn it before…from a photo that my mother took on her trip to Ireland. Turns out it was the same dolmen. Hah.

The wreck of the Plassey on Innisheer, the smallest of the Aran Islands. This massive ship was wrecked in the early 1960s and was washed ashore where it’s been deteriorating ever since. Joel and I sought it out because it was featured as an aerial view in the intro to Father Ted, one of my favourite tv shows.

We thought “we can’t leave Ireland without drawing one the famine cottages”. Most famine cottages are either in ruins or have been converted to animal enclosures; this one was being used as a shed. It was located on the road towards the Rosserk Priory in Co. Mayo.

I love this building so much. It used to be an Edwardian bathhouse that specialized in seaweed baths, but was abandoned 40 years ago because the tide was encroaching. I love that it was built to look like a sandcastle. Not to worry though, if you want a seaweed bath you can visit Enniskillen Bathhouse up the road in Enniscrone, another Edwardian-era bathhouse still in operation. Joel and I tried a seaweed and steam bath there and it is definitely an experience.

Women’s History series

March was Women’s History Month and I decided to do a series of portraits highlighting some of my favourite women in the arts and literature.

Mrs. Doyle, the long-suffering housekeeper on the classic TV series Father Ted ,has a few of the funniest scenes I’ve ever seen. Just thinking about them makes me laugh. Like when she falls off the windowsill…good Lord it’s hilarious.

Beatrix Potter is undoubtedly the most famous female illustrator of all time. Just like L.M. Montgomery above, her books have never been out of print. Peter Rabbit is an enduring character, and her illustrations continue to bring joy to kids (and adults like me) around the world a hundred years later. One day I hope to visit her estate in the Lake District. 

L.M. Montgomery is one of my favourite writers and our Canadian pride and joy. Anne of Green Gables is a modern classic; it’s never been out of print since its publication in 1908. I’m working my way through her archive of over twenty novels and hundreds of short stories. Her work has also provided me with the source material for two of my absolute favourite tv series of all time: Road to Avonlea and Anne of Green Gables (the 1980s series, not the recent crap, thank you very much).

Emily Dickinson-  the 19th century poet whose mournful poetry some people find depressing, but I like the melancholy of it.

Julia Margaret Cameron – one of my favourite artists, she took up photography in her sixties…in the 1860s! I started seeing her photography pop up on the web in the late 1990s, but didn’t know they belonged to her. I drew a lot of her photos in those days because I was drawn to the pre-Raphaelite Victorian tragedy of them (lots of Madonna/child poses). She is credited as being one the first “artistic” photographers.