Liz : When I first talked with Kathryn about her coming to see the house and stay with us she said how nice it would be to do some sketching. I thought that would be nice as I loved art when I was younger, before we had kids and I had the time to pursue it. My favourite and most familiar medium is pencil, but I also used biro, acrylics and my GCSE art work was in pastels. So, I was thrilled that Kathryn had suggested it. I was really excited about having someone else there who wanted to spend sometime doing something creative, and being able to encourage each other. It would be a lovely, relaxing way to spend some time, enjoy the surroundings, reconnect with our youth.
On the day we visited the beach we took the pastels and small sketch pad. With a small range of colours I drew the view out to the island of Arran. It was done quickly and I'm not sure the results are the best I could have done.
By comparison, one afternoon we picked a few flowers from the verge outside the house and spent a couple of hours doing various studies of the flowers, and I also did the view from the window with a bank of the purple blooms along the wall that borders the road. Watercolours isn't something I ever learned the techniques of, but I was really chuffed with how this one turned out. The landscape was left behind on the fridge door.
We drew elements of the garden - me using biro to draw the house and the hillside behind it, and Kathryn using pastels to draw the plant pots along the boundary, enjoying the pop of colour against the green. She also spent time creating a brilliantly coloured elephant from acrylics, which turned out amazingly.
We collected shells from the seashore near Kames when we stopped to see the Waverley paddle steamer, and then did pencil studies of them, which I think turned out really well. I think there is still some latent talent in there somewhere, and I will definitely be honing this skill when we are full time in Scotland. I can't wait. Add in the photography and videography which I've been enjoying recently, and I think it could be a full time hobby...
And finally, when we visited the sculpture garden we took some charcoal which Kathryn had brought and we drew the tiny concrete houses that appeared out of the water as the tide went out. Kathryn also later drew the gardener's dog from a photograph. The best thing was that neither of us was hung up on the results of our endeavours - it was just nice to sit quietly together, enjoy the peace of the nature around us and using a part of our brains that had been dormant for years!
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