Four of the characters in this play are the wind.
This presents a problem you may remember from the Disney film Pochahontas – namely, can you paint with all the colours of the wind? If so, what are those colours? Because you can’t really see the wind, can you. Traditionally the main visual indicator of the phenomenon is a trail of destruction. My first thought, then, is things being blown by it.
If you have a more imaginative way of doing this, please leave a comment…
Two in one again today. The first one isn’t technically a drawing I suppose, but never mind. It’s an experiment with the text from the story.
And today’s effort is a set of quick character sketches for the youngest, prettiest daughter. When you put ‘pretty’ into flickr or google image search you get a lot of loose waves and enormous eyes. Combine this with my tendency to draw people in an overly cartoony style and this is the sort of thing you get. I think this is exacerbated by using photos, so at some point this month I will endeavour to draw from life… But not on this day.
Because I did not post yesterday, today you get 2 drawings in one go. How delightful. You can see even more if you go on the 28 Drawings Later Facebook page, which I urge you to do. I love basically everything on there. Although a word of warning – don’t go expressing your love by clicking ‘like’ on every other picture unless you are happy for them to clog up all your friends’ stalkerfeeds. I did that the first day and my flatmates signed in to just see about 30 pictures by strangers on their home page, with nary a status update about how that person you knew in school fifteen years ago ‘ate a really nice biscuit’ to be seen.
In other news, if you happen to be in Pitlochry this evening (well, it could happen) why not head to the Festival Theatre at 9.30pm? They are running an event as part of the Winter Words Festival called Fearie Tales, where actors read out scary fairy stories, and tonight (after an evening with Neil Oliver, which sounds delightful) they are reading one of mine. It’s called Daniel and the Witch and it’s probably excellent, but that is not really for me to say.
East of the Sun, West of the Moon – you’re going to need some sort of navigational help to find that place aren’t you.
The kind but poor gentleman’s wife. I don’t know how she got her hair like that.
I thought I’d experiment with a few character sketches from the play. First on the list is ‘A kind but poor gentleman’. I’m not sure exactly how old he is, or whether he wears a hat… So I drew a couple of kind men. In hats. Hats make the gentleman, probably. I imagine him sort of shabby but refined although that patently doesn’t come over in either of these, they both appear quite well to do. OH WELL. This is why we do research.
As discussed, this month I am going to do the 28 Days Later Drawing Challenge. I am posting the pictures here too because there is a literary theme – I am doing a series of images as research for a new theatre company called Inglenook, who are debuting a kids show called East of the Sun and West of the Moon at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Image the first is an inglenook, or old fashioned fireplace – because they’re going to need a logo at some point. I thought drawing this might help me think of an idea for one, but no joy so far. I mainly just feel the need for some better pencils. And shame that I haven’t drawn without the aid of a graphic tablet in months.
Anyway, if you want to see what other people are doing this month, or even join in, you should ‘like’ the Facebook page. I would highly recommend you do as well, there are already loads of brilliant pictures on there.
In November 2010 I completed National Novel Writing Month, a challenge where you have to write 50,000 words of a novel before midnight on November 30th. From this adventure, an idea was born.
The received wisdom is that once the first draft of a novel is written, you’re supposed to leave it alone for at least three months before returning to edit – preferably longer. Coming back to it with fresh eyes means you’re more likely to be ruthless about cutting stuff that doesn’t work. But what do you do in the meantime? For me, the answer was write more. Essentially, NaNoWriMo created a monster.
In 2011, I set out to write the first draft of a novel every month of the year. I gave each month a genre, and off I went. It was hard going, and I only reached the hallowed 50, 000 words twice throughout the year. But I don’t regard that as total failure, more as a lesson in what is physically possible.
Whenever I was tempted to beat myself up about it, I went back to the fact I was working four days a week as an office temp throughout the year, as well as producing monthly columns for The Broughton Spurtle and Ten Tracks, and other articles for Mslexia Magazine, IdeasTap, The Guardian and STV as I went along. I may not have produced 50k fiction every month, but I think I probably did reach 50k across all my writing. I blogged about this in June to serve as a constant reminder.
But what was the final word count? Drumroll, please….
Continue reading “12 Books in 12 Months: A Review”
12 Books in 12 Months 