Island adventures, sketchbook failures, and the secret behind the blue doors

Story Street #11

Welcome to the latest Story Street – this is issue 11, which means it’s nearly a year since I started writing my newsletter. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoy writing it. If you are new to Story Street, you can catch up on all the old issues here, where you’ll find a mixture of community art projects, picture book progress and snippets from my comic diary:

What a month August has been – it feels like longer, in the best possible way. I’ve explored two very beautiful islands, made tea on the beach, swum in the chilly clear waters of the Atlantic and the North Sea, overcome my musical inhibitions – and completely failed to draw a single solitary thing in my sketchbook.

I did however keep up to date with my comic diary, and I’ll share some of this later – but before I do that, here’s a little reminder that my online comics class starts this month, and it’s not too late to join. It will be on Zoom, starting on 20^th Sept on Wednesdays, and there’s a morning and an evening option. All the details are here, do join the gang.

Now let me tell you about those island adventures. The prompt for the Ireland trip was that my son and daughter were both playing in the Tag Rugby World Cup in Limerick!

I am a very proud and astonished parent as I have always been completely unable to catch or throw a ball. How on earth did that happen?

But I did bring my sewing skills… here’s my bedraggled banner drying out after some sideways Irish rain:

Afterwards we had a few days in Galway with family friends, and I even made a bit of oak gall ink to keep some small boys entertained. This process involves crushing oak galls and cooking them up on the stove with rusty iron scraps, and I used honey instead of gum Arabic – it was very sticky ink…

If you want to try for yourself (and it seems to be a good year for oak galls), I made some notes last time I attempted the recipe:

I was soaking up the sights and sounds like a sponge in Ireland. Here’s my favourite bit of signage from The Burren – one day I WILL visit that donkey farm.

(if you are new to Story Street, here’s why I am cautious about donkeys… )

We had one night on Inisheer/Inis Oirr, the smallest of the Aran islands, which is gently wrapped in a mesh of the most beautiful dry stone walls. Washed up on the Eastern shore is the rusting hulk of the Plassey, a freighter that was wrecked in 1960. My daughter really made me laugh when she suggested we could put the whole ship in a giant saucepan with every oak gall in Ireland and make the biggest bottle of ink ever seen.

We also went to a wonderful concert on the island – the Dave Clancy Trio, check them out here:

Our next trip was to Orkney – a beautiful archipelago off the far north coast of Scotland. The skies are huge and the sea is silver – it’s like being on the very edge of the world. The beaches are deserted, and there are sprinklings everywhere of interesting relics from Neolithic times as well as from Scapa Flow’s role in WW1 and WW2. It was my first visit and I loved it.

One of Orkney’s ‘big five’ tourist attractions is the ‘Ring of Brodgar’ – a prehistoric stone circle. The legend has it that the stones were once giants who danced all night to the tune of a fiddler: they were still dancing at dawn when the sun turned them all to rock. One is set apart from the rest – the ‘Comet stone’, which is said to be the fiddle player. Here I am attempting to absorb some fiddle powers from that ancient stone:

About those blue doors at the top of the newsletter. The first was one that I spotted on the back streets of Stromness, where I fell for its accidental colour palette. Wouldn’t it be satisfying to paint something wild using all those exact blues?

The second blue door tuned out to be the portal to a secret world, which I entered by the harbour in Kirkwall. Ever since I started to learn the fiddle around 6 years ago, it’s been my dream to be able to turn up at a trad session in a pub and join in. And I have managed to do it – but never on my own, and with complete strangers.

This requires next-level bravery for someone as stricken with performance anxiety as me - my new picture book with Jenni Desmond is all about this very subject and I can’t wait to show you her glorious artwork for it.

At the beginning of the week I was bold enough to visit a ‘Slow Session’ organised by Orkney Music and Culture – just right for my pace, though I didn’t know very many of the tunes. And during that evening I was invited to another session later in the week, behind that blue door – “just ring on the doorbell, someone will let you in”.

The day of the session came, and we visited Hoy, where we discovered an unofficial beach gallery of flotsam sculptures. I loved it, but all I could think about was the session – was I really brave enough to go?

I’d been reading ‘First Time Ever’, Peggy Seeger’s autobiography, recalling wild freewheeling days touring folk clubs in the late 50s. And that’s what decided me.

I rang the doorbell with a trembling finger…

And inside was the warmest welcome I could possibly have hoped for. I learned some new tunes, played some old ones, and when a local farmer offered to let me play his made-in-Orkney fiddle I was thrilled. Without thinking about it, my fingers began playing ‘Inisheer’, neatly connecting my two island trips. Many jigs, reels and hornpipes later, midnight arrived and it was time to go – but I am SO glad I built up the nerve to ring that doorbell. Thankyou to everyone who was there - I have a list of new tunes to learn and I’ll be working my way through them.

Now… about that sketchbook.

You know how people always say you should spend 50% of your sketchbook time looking, and only half with your pencil on the paper? I’ve invented a new approach – 100% looking, 0% drawing.

Before we set off, I spent a happy afternoon making a hard cover for a soft handmade paper sketchbook I’d bought at the Royal Academy. It looked lovely! I used Japanese paper and red binding tape from Shepherds fine papers. TOO lovely as it turned out – I just couldn’t bring myself to get started, and I found all that handmade paper just too daunting. Next time I’ll go back to my scrappy concertinas with holes in. Sorry, splendid sketchbook.

On the way home we visited my Auntie Shirley – if you watched any of my lockdown ‘Family Creative Challenge’ videos, you will remember her amazing knitting projects. You can still catch up on all the videos on my YouTube channel here:

Next stop was Berwick, where it was a treat to meet Helen Stephens and Tania Willis of Good Ship Illustration fame (you can find Helen’s newsletter, Pencil Pals, here and I thoroughly recommend it, especially if you are interested in picture books). Finally, we went to an exhibition that left me feeling very inspired and raring to get back to my shipyard collages. ‘Shipbuilders and Fisherfolk’ at Hartlepool Art Gallery is the result of many months spent in this north-east coastal town by illustrator and ‘inky-fingered troubadour’ Jonny Hannah, who got chatting to everyone he encountered to build a trove of stories about local characters.

The exhibition includes painted guitars and record covers, screen prints and plates, and even a comic that made me laugh very much. If you can possibly get yourself to Hartlepool before 4^th November, do pay a visit.

Just after I got home I went to a lovely book launch - for ‘Meet the Maliks’ by Zanib Mian, illustrated by Kyan Cheng, published by Hachette. It was lovely to see Fen Coles from the Little Rebels awards there too - she took the picture of us two previous Little Rebels winners below, thankyou Fen!

Meet the Maliks is the first in a series about detective twins, Maysa and Musa. It’s a very funny book, told in the highly engaging voice of Maysa and dotted with drawings throughout - and the mystery kept me guessing right to the end. I particularly enjoyed the way the story is set during Ramadan in a Muslim family - I learned a lot! I’ve added ‘Meet the Maliks’ to my ‘Recommended’ list - if you’d like to browse this, or buy any of my books, there’s a handy link below:

If you have enjoyed this newsletter, do share with a friend, and if you haven’t already subscribed, just click the button below (it’s free).

That’s all for now - I’m ready to do lots of writing this September, and have lots of new ideas swirling around. That’s what holidays are for! See you next month.