Into my imagination

... the connection between travel in Norway, photography, drawing on location and illustrative play.

A result of playing with the magic of Norway in my mind as inspiration… quite a new thing for me trying to do it so abstractedly.

Hello lovely people! It’s been a while… I’ve spent the first few months of the year in the illustrators cave with my head and hands deep in book making land… but finally I’ve crawled out. And I feel like I have so much to say!

Norway - somewhere real, or a bit of my imagination?

At the start of February we went to Norway. I shared photos on instagram and as I shared them I got so many messages from people saying it was like I’d somehow arrived into one of my pictures. I felt like this. Somehow, I had landed in the inside of my mind. I had found a place where what I imagine so often was actually real.

We had a few days in Oslo where the ground was covered in ice and woke up on the first morning to a lovely downfall of snow. I was already utterly delighted. This delight turned to absolute awe as we got on a train and headed west, which was a journey from sunshine leaving Oslo, to a blizzard at the highest point of the mountains, and then to squally rain as we arrived in beautiful Bergen (I can’t seem to write Bergen without adding an adjective. It is truly such a delightful place).

Views from the train on the way to Bergen… as we got higher the snow got thicker. A blizzard ensued

On the train I was obsessed with the way life got increasingly covered up by snow. I loved the bright colours of the timber houses and I adored watching them disappear into the landscape (literally) as snow drift crawled up the sides of buildings and icicles hung from rooftops. I was also obsessed with the turquoise of the mountain rivers and how textured the hill faces looked when the trees got layered up in snow.

Photos from the train window… some od these were from the train on the way back to Oslo from Bergen a week later, after a lot more snow

As got closer to Bergen, and went down the other side of the mountain range, the sea made things warmer… and it got wet. Wind blew the water of fjords and it felt fabulously wild.

Top photos from the train window just before arriving in Bergen. Bottom ones, me climbing the hill behind Bergen before the main snow fell… and the view from the hill looking back down.

Our time in Bergen was extraordinary because it snowed. A lot. People kept telling us how lucky we were (I think because Bergen is on the sea even in the winter it doesn’t get a reliable cover of snow), and it felt like the town definitely appreciated it. Everyone was skiing from their doors and heading up into the hill behind the city after work to ski under the lit trails. People of all ages were tobogganing down. It felt like everyone was as delighted as I was that their world had turned white.

The beautiful colourful timber houses looked made to be in the snow. They reminded me a bit of the beautiful timber homes in Estonia…

When it snows, for me, everything becomes so extraordinarily beautiful. Lines appear in the landscape where bits of colour remains against the white and there is a minimalism to things that pre-snow were more complicated (I wonder if this is where the Scandi minimal aesthetic comes from?).

Drawing from life while I sat in the window

While we were there I drew a little bit, mostly from the window of the apartment we were staying in. I could sit there, knees against a heater and watch the snow fall over the town below. It was perfection. I thought I might quite like to stay there forever.

I loved the pollarded trees and the people in the distance plodding along in the snow. Both of these images where inspired by framing the people in a way that looked nice on the page.

I was really happy with the two sketches above. For me they had a loose painterliness that I often wish I had more of in my work. I also like how I managed to get the right hand one to fade out into a grey background and enjoyed all the white! Something I think I need more of on my pages. I like the one below too, the grand vista showing off the ridiculously gorgeous town, but it felt more like my ‘normal’ work and thus less exciting.

The whole vista!

Moving from drawing on location to playing at home

There is a big difference between drawing on location and making an illustration. And the endless challenge for so many of us is to work out how to connect these. I still don’t know but I am trying to pay more attention to what happens after I experience something like Norway, where I felt so incredibly inspired and alive.

When I got home I sat at my desk and worked head down on two books with tight deadlines. As I finished them, piles and piles of scrappy edge paper grew around me (like the scribbly edge you can see on the right above where I mix my colours on the paper). And, I decided, to start doodling on them.

The one above on the left was my ‘original’ Norway inspired play on scrap paper that was piled high on the desk. I just scribbled and then added some trees and houses. It was so free. I liked it. So I decided to do more. the one on the right followed. And then I think the one at the start of this email (which I really quite love) And then I made some more (below). I included adding a little bit of collage (the houses on the right) which is totally wild for me :).

And finally, I made the one below. And I really love it. It is rare I feel so happy with something I’ve made. It feels like an illustration, but made with a lot more freedom than I often feel when I don’t draw from life and instead try to draw from my mind or memory or feeling. It is so different than work I usually make. I really love the colours. And I also really love that it doesn’t really look anything like the photos I took of Norway, but instead to me it feels as if it expresses the magic I felt when I travelled through it. A lovely friend at Bologna Book Fair told me that she’d love to see a book from me that felt as passionate and free and inspired as I seemed when I was travelling through the wintery landscapes of Norway. I would love this too and often feel that I don’t really know how to do that. Yet, I think in playing like this - using quite precise inspiration, but very free materials, that just maybe, I might have a starting point for this.

I love this picture. I don’t really know why but it feels like all the right kind of magic for me!

We shall see!

Stay tuned… hopefully for the development of this playful expression into something of a story!