I’ve often said that messing with art helps me de-stress and since perhaps you can tell from my previous blog post that the last few months have been stressful, you might wonder if I’ve been following my own advice?
The answer is: ish.
Every year Liz Hedgecock and I do a challenge for Lent, and this year we decided to try mixed media art. Unlike Liz who is a much better artist, and more disciplined, I apply the same approach to learning art as to learning most things: that is, I fiddle until I’ve figured it out, or something’s exploded.
This year, I wanted to experiment with a combination of watercolour, acrylic, fine liners, markers, and modelling paste. As I didn’t have modelling paste, I wondered if I could make some using stuff from home. Thanks to an internet ‘recipe’ I produced a sort of gloop using cornflour (cornstarch) and PVA glue. Did it work? Nope. So I bought some and started again.
It was well into Lent before I got going, and then I worked on it for thirty minutes a day until it was as finished as it was going to be.
Even though it’s not quite what’s in my head, and only one of the hares (yes, they’re supposed to be hares) looks like a hare (ish), the process was happy and positive, largely because I was enjoying messing with the colours, and experimenting without overthinking what I was doing. I think I might do it again to see if I can get closer to what I envisioned.
So that was April.
Some time in May I saw some prompts for a sketching challenge based on finding positivity in nature.
As a lonely, bullied child, I would find my peace, reassurance and grounding in the local woods or by the local river. There I discovered comfort in being part of something so big, that my problems seemed small, hidden in a beauty which made the ugliness of school life recede. Although I don’t do that sort of wandering as much as I should now, I do have a lovely garden in which the writing shed hides surrounded by greenery.
So with that in mind, I decided to create something from the first prompt, which was ‘Sanctuary’.
Time went by and I couldn’t even find half hour an to do anything, but after work on a particularly stressful day, I took some art stuff and a glass of wine down to the writing shed aiming to start a small simple watercolour painting.
However when I arrived at the shed, I set out my small selection of brushes, a little bottle of water and my glass of wine, but couldn’t find the little pallet of watercolour paints that I could’ve sworn I’d put in my bag. I went back to the house but couldn’t find them anywhere, so gave up, and using watercolour pencils instead, did what I could, periodically dipping brushes and pencils in my wine instead of the water (which doesn’t improve the flavour). By now, however, I was mentally in the wrong zone and don’t really know what I’m doing with watercolour pencils.
I was aiming for an image of myself in the writing shed being creative and happy as seen through the branches of our rather overgrown cherry tree.
This is what I ended up with.
Me, stuck in a birdcage in the middle of a jungle.
(Naturally as soon as I got back in the house, I found the little watercolour palette disguising itself against the black background of the basket which I called sac magique, in which I cart things around sometimes.)
I gave up trying for a bit.
Then a couple of weeks ago, my husband and I spent a few days in the Languedoc. I needed a break from writing and editing, but not creativity. So I took my travelling sketching kit.
My husband and I, despite both being city born, are country mice by nature, and usually rent places in the countryside. But this time, we stayed in a place with a balcony overlooking Place Carnot in Carcassonne. We enjoyed people watching and listening to the buzz of conversation from below, and wandering the area. Wherever we went I sketched little scenes from what I saw in front of me.
It was so freeing making myself capture something as best as I could quickly without working out composition or what the picture was trying to say. That’s not to say there wasn’t a story – or couldn’t be a story – behind each one, but I was simply having fun and resting my mind.
Last week turned out a good deal more intense than I anticipated when I wrote the previous blog, however everything on my rationalised to-do list got done, albeit a day behind schedule.
So afterwards, I thought, ‘Now I’m feeling calm, if tired, I’m going to the shed to try my sanctuary painting again’ and I did.
The result is below.
You can make of it what you will.
I showed photos of both ‘Sanctuary’ paintings to my oldest child’s partner, without any context.
He said ‘Pretty colours and shapes’ about the first until he spotted someone inside at which point he said ‘Ah – a gilded cage. Pretty, but a cage all the same.’ He then looked at the other one, still no context. He said ‘The water droplet makes me think of freedom, free flowing. It seems peaceful. It’s a place of rest and safety not a cage.’
Now, it’s true that he has a psychology degree, but at this particular moment, he was squinting at my small phone in bright sun while drinking cocktails, and despite being very short-sighted, hadn’t brought his glasses. So his assessment possibly has the psychological robustness of a ‘What sort of boy will make my ideal partner’ quiz in a teenage girl’s magazine.
But I like it and I’m sticking with it.
What do you think?
All words and pictures copyright (c) 2025 Paula Harmon. None must be reproduced without express permission or credit. No permission is given for any to be used to train artificial intelligence.
Despite any number of other things competing for my attention in October, I decided to Inktober again. In case you don’t know, this is a challenge to draw something everyday in October using ink and following a prompt set up by Inktober on Instagram. There was also a suggestion of which might be coloured rather than monochrome if the artist fancied it.
There are some astonishing artists out there but I’m not one of them. I just like sketching as a relaxation tool as I’ve said before. It makes me take a few minutes out of my day and use a part of my brain that doesn’t get dusted off that often which helps reset the other bits of my brain that are on hamster wheels.
I’m not particularly competitive other than against myself, but I like a challenge if I think I can do it without exploding for no reason other than pride. I can beat myself up endlessly about my failures in a lot of areas, but art isn’t one of them.
Last year the prompts were pretty random. This year there was a theme – travel – with a couple of curve balls (‘rust’ and ‘violin’ being the ones most off topic) and several that were so similar as to be almost indistinguishable: ‘trek’, ‘hike’, roam’, ‘expedition’.
As the world currently seems to be often a scary and sad place, I decided that I wouldn’t try to have any hidden meanings in any of my sketches this year. I decided to attempt light humour. This also wasn’t always easy when following the prompt – a challenge in itself.
I’m pleased with some and less pleased with others. Some I will possibly draw again. Some days it was hard to find the time, energy or inspiration but overall it was fun. Two of the sketches are based on life: the pony trekking (6th) and camping in a gale with my father insisting on cooking breakfast (22nd). In other sketches, the little girls are also sort of me and my sister and the teddy is sort of her bear Freda (2nd, 7th, 24th). The dragons wouldn’t like to be left out of course and somehow a unicorn muscled its way in, ridden by a friend. It proves I can’t draw horses even when they’re magical but there you go.
Not being confident enough to simply start inking directly onto paper, I made a sketch first and then inked in the detail using fineliners and on a couple of occasions white board markers because I needed more ink. I didn’t use ink ink with a pen as I need to practise that and I didn’t think to use ink ink with a brush. But I might start to do some practising because it appeals – I was longing for my watercolours throughout.
Looking back, I realised I could have created a story using the prompts as the plot. It didn’t occur to me when I was looking at them and it would probably have added a layer of stress I didn’t want or need this year.
Next year though… maybe I will.
Let’s see what the 2025 prompts bring.
But without further ado, here are my thirty-one inktober efforts for 2024. Which (if any) is your favourite?
Words and picture Copyright (c) 2024 Paula Harmon. Not to be used without the author’s express permission.
This month I’m taking part in Inktober again, and the prompts all relate to travelling. My brain is going off piste as usual, but even so, it’s brought back many forgotten memories, only one of which, so far, has got into a sketch.
Before they had children, my parents were keen hikers. They marched out of London carting whopping metal-framed rucksacks and wearing heavy boots into the wilds of North Wales, Scotland, Cumbria and Northern Ireland, camping in the middle of nowhere.
They told us tales of a friend’s beard frozen to the zip on their sleeping bag; Dad standing on a broken bottle as he bathed in a chilly river and having to limp several miles to get it stitched up; the joy of finding a town with public bathing facilities (as in bath-tubs and the facility being public not the bath-tubs) where they could finally wash luxuriously in hot water.
Once my sister and I were old enough to walk for any distance, we were bought walking boots and went hiking too. (Note the faded polaroid of me, Mum and sister looking glamorous in Scotland below.)
One summer, when there was very little money in the holiday fund, we spent a week hiking about the Gower coast ‘Jasper Hunting’. That is, looking for seams of jasper in the rocks. We found a lot of fossils, which was fascinating in itself and the fact that we never found any jasper didn’t matter at all.
As a child, Dad loved horse-riding. I’m not sure whose horse he rode, because he definitely didn’t have one of his own. As an adult, he was keen that my sister and I learned to ride. I was keen too, having the typical little girl fascination with horses (albeit that I wanted mine to be winged unicorns) but I only ever had a few lessons during which my lack of natural authority became apparent. I was very good at getting on and off in the approved manner. What happened in the interim was entirely up to the horse who knew exactly who was in control. It wasn’t me.
We went on a couple of pony treks as a family and once the pony I was riding lost interest in plodding after its companions quite quickly and let them disappear into the mountains while it munched grass and contemplated what it had done to deserve such a dull life.
No amount of rein-pulling, prodding and encouragement made the pony move until… a bunch of kids from the local pony club galloped past. My pony raised its head, clearly thought ‘That looks like fun!’ and galloped after them.
During the terrifying minutes before the pony realised it couldn’t keep up and decided to wheel about and join its trundling stablemates, I lost hold of the reins and lay forward gripping its mane for dear life with my hands and its flank with my knees. I have no idea how I didn’t fall off. My unrequited love for horses abated after that.
A few years later, Dad and Mum joined a group setting up a visitor centre on a Welsh mountain. We’d spend our Saturdays there, helping with displays but mostly going for long walks high above the South Welsh valleys. No one who met me later really believed this, as Dad remained plump despite all the exercise and latterly spent most of his spare time sitting down writing. But back then, that’s what he did and consequently what we did.
I was twelve by then and wouldn’t have dreamed of telling anyone at school that I spent my Saturdays in hiking boots and kagoule, clambering up mountainsides while they were going to town with friends to buy records and make-up.
When you’re that age of course, all parents are embarrassing but mine seemed worse than most. A sister who was nearly three and a half years younger wasn’t much better. So I did my best to pretend I wasn’t with them.
We’d walk up hummocky, heathery, gorsey slopes under cloudy skies and I’d fall behind, forming descriptions in my head of a lone girl pacing herself as she seeks shelter in an inhospitable landscape, uncertain how long it’ll take to find it, or indeed if she ever will, longing for the lush, fertile country she comes from, escaping across wild, desolate, bare slopes without any certainty as to whether she’ll survive.
Then of course, I’d be dragged back into reality by someone yelling at me to stop lagging behind, or shout that it was time for a picnic of cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea.
I’d pause before catching up and look about, as the real world replaced my imagined one.
Greenish, greyish, purplish slopes climbed above me. Below was the pine forest we’d descend through later, crushing scented needles underfoot until we reached the visitor centre. Below that were rows of grey roofed terraced houses in a mining town. Further below was the motorway, the oil refinery… then dunes and the sea.
I recall those walks as always taken under overcast skies, rain imminent, but there must have been sunny days too. Perhaps the remembered weather is a reflection of that adolescent mood.
Now I live in chalk and cheese country: chalky ridges surrounding lush meadows. To my shame, I’m more likely to be indoors writing rather than outdoors hiking. My walking boots are who knows where, doubtless inhabited by spiders.
But that lonely figure whose journey I used to imagine in those Welsh hills is still trekking. She became a character in a novel that I started but never finished and is under the spare bed waiting for me to chivvy her up.
Perhaps it’s time to climb those slopes again and help her reach the end of her journey.
(Though I’m determined she’ll have something more appealing than cheese sandwiches and thermos flask tea awaiting when she arrives. I certainly will.)
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2024. Not to be used or reproduced without the author’s express permission.
If you want to see what else I draw for Inktober – please follow me on Instagram
Am I alone in seeing stories everywhere? I can’t remember when I didn’t think ‘what’s their story?’, ‘what if X happened next?’, ‘why are they/is this/am I like this? What led them/it/me here?’
I dealt with long boring journeys by imagining the lives of the people we passed in the car, or what might be behind a high wall/hedge (lots of Cornish trips), or why a castle was in ruins. I coped with bullying by imagining situations in which I managed to express my feelings and the bullies changed their ways (biggest fiction exercise of my life). I enjoyed subjects where there was a story (English, History, RE), or patterns (Maths, Physics) or a challenge deciphering a pattern (Maths, Languages). If I’d spotted the stories in Geography and patterns in Chemistry, I might have enjoyed much them more than I did. If I’d been taught art differently, perhaps I’d have got to grips with that at school too. I stopped taking art at fourteen, in what was then called the Third Year, and is now called Year Nine, and in both eras called ‘Options Year’. This was when you study a million subjects at exactly the point of adolescence when you have become really truculent and know all adults are idiots, yet have to decide what you’re going to do for your first set of public exams (in my case, O levels). Long story short, I dropped art at fourteen.
Ever since I could create a word, I have been by nature a writer. But Liz Hedgecock has been encouraging me for some months to do art challenges with her giving me the chance to play catch-up on those art lessons I put to one side. I’ve found it really freeing, tapping into the part of me that writes short stories rather than novels. It’s a chance to try a narrative in a few lines rather than huge number of words. When she suggested we try Inktober, I was happy to give it a go. But when I looked at the prompts, I knew almost immediately that at my skill level I was definitely going to look for a ‘story’ for each one, not only to cover up my inadequate skills but to keep me motivated.
I think that largely Liz did the same, although with a different approach. You can see what Liz did here. But if you don’t follow me on Instagram – here is what I came up with and a summary of the background behind the stories that came into my head. to help me make sense of the prompts.
Dream, Spiders, Path, Dodge, Map
To start with I dug out a bottle of ink I’ve had forever and a lovely fancy glass ink dipping pen and did what I could with them.
I used the ink and pen for the first three and found myself sketching in a fluid, free-form way which tapped into my subconscious quite nicely.
As a vivid dreamer, it was hard to know where to stop for Dream. I included all my recurring dreams and nightmares but tried to make sure my bed was heading into happiness, even though I remembered too late that pictures should read left to right, not right to left. Ho hum.
I don’t like hurting Spiders, but prefer them at a distance, so looking at photos of them to draw from made me feel queasy. I decided to turn our treatment of them on its head which sort of coincided with our daughter (home for a break during peak house-spider season) talking to us through the Ring doorbell in a husky voice ‘Hello! I’m Simon the Spider. I just want to be friends. Please let me in.’
Path – the last I drew with ink and dipping pen for a bit, depicts me at some point in my life in my early twenties, deciding between the risky route of chasing my creative dreams where the dragons were (left) and the sensible career route (right). I picked the latter but am now in a position to go back to that fork in the path and change direction.
However, that’s not to say it’s all easy running and Dodge, the first one I drew with a fineliner (can’t remember why I changed, but it changed how the drawings turned out) has me trying to get to my happy place while being attacked by household duties, work/writing deadlines and to-do lists.
By the time I was drawing Map, I was away from home and had a mini art kit, so it was drawn with a fineliner and is perhaps the last one digging into my subconscious for all the things that prompt or hinder creativity. I wasn’t terribly happy with Map, but that’s how it goes. On the other hand I was an avid map drawer as a child, so it was good fun and I just wish I’d had a bigger piece of paper and fewer distractions.
Golden, Drop, Toad, Bounce, Fortune, Wander
A dragon was the first thing that sprung to mind for the prompt Golden. I went straight back to being six and the teacher reading from the Hobbit about Smaug the dragon in class, though my dragon of course is less murderous and mostly understood. I’ve always wanted to draw a dragon but thought I couldn’t, but I decided to give it a go anyway and found all those scales rather therapeutic to draw.
Drop – I regret to say that the word ‘drop’ just made me think of a running nose, so I had to do a bit of lateral thinking. I knew what I wanted to draw for Toad, so it seemed logical to draw what happened before… It nearly ended up with being a potion to turn a man back INTO a toad after a regretable spell. You’ll just have to decide whether it’s his fault for dabbling or the soup-maker has a naughty intent.
As for Bounce – I thought of the bounciest thing I could think of and tried not to remember the Spacehopper my father ran over when I was seven. I was very fond of it, and it never recovered. It gave my Dad a fright though.
Fortune was difficult for a number of reasons. I couldn’t think what to draw at all – or rather I could, but it was too complicated. It was difficult day at work and I wasn’t really in the mood that evening. I decided to go back to the ink and dipping pen and then regretted it. Everything went wrong! But what I was aiming for was the idea that there’s definitely a rich man in the seeker’s life but it’s at her expense. No idea if that comes across.
Wander was easier and is based on two photos of my daughter in different forests in different years, wondering which way to go next. (Bless her, my daughter ended up as an unwitting model and doesn’t look anything like the way I’ve portrayed her but I’m pleased that she’s braver at trying different routes than I was at the same age.)
Spicy, Rise, Castle, Dagger, Angel, Demon.
I could have drawn my husband’s numerous chilli plants for Spicy, or the contents of our spice cupboard, but of course ‘spicy’ has another meaning and I decided to have fun and go down that route as well! It took me four attempts to write ‘chipotle’. I could type it, but I couldn’t write it with a pen. This is one that I’m planning to do again and/or colour.
Likewise Rise – I suppose I could have saved this idea for Fire, but a phoenix rising with hope from disappointment and fear of failure seemed apt that particular day.
By the time I was drawing Castle, I was away from home again, and trying to deal with the intricacies of a real castle didn’t appeal. A sandcastle while more manageable felt a bit dull, so guess what – a story came to mind. My daughter loves octopuses and in a story world, one would come to her rescue if she needed it. (in reality she’d probably just biff anyone stomped on her sandcastle).
Despite writing murder mysteries which occasionally involve daggers etc, and despite thinking that daggers can be very beautiful and nearly drawing the one from Murder Dunovaria, the news being what it is, I didn’t fancy drawing a Dagger. The phrase ‘beating swords into ploughshares’ came to mind so I decided to draw (not very well as you can tell from my having to redraw the hammer) daggers being turned into doves.
The Angels in the nativity play come from the disappointment of never having been one as I described in Advent Calendar and also from remembering when my son was a shepherd in a nativity play aged five. He had his crook confiscated after rehearsals because he kept tripping up the primmest angel. When the day of the public performance came however, somehow he’d managed to get hold of a crook again and guess what he did? The primmest angel flat on her face as she walked down the aisle. He swore it was curiosity not malice but… I was the one dealing with her cross mum.
I didn’t want to draw a Demon for a number of reasons, so decided to do the sort of thing I’d have done at school and re-interpret the brief. So instead of demon, we have demonise. It was close to National Black Cat Day apparently, so that’s what I went for. Poor black cats. They don’t deserve the bad press. It’s time for them to fight back.
Away from home again with a simple art kit, I was wondering what on earth to do for Saddle, then remembered a story I had in Weird & Peculiar Tales, itself prompted by a dream, in which a hapless goblin cross breeds a werewolf with a chihuahua and went from there. (Admittedly my husband asked why I’d drawn a chicken being put on a dog, but hey.)
Plump coincided with the launch of Booker & Fitch omnibus of books 1-3 so here I am being plump (I’m plumper in real life) plumped down on plump cushions in Hazeby-on-Wyvern reading the book.
Frost was easy in theory, although I was in a very hot place at the time, so it was hard to imagine, and I found it hard to draw with black on white and wished I were home with black paper and white or silver pen, but I wasn’t. So here I am as a child, when I didn’t have a radiator in my bedroom with the view of mountains from my window obscured by frost as happened quite often.
Chains was a horse who was waiting, poor thing, to cart tourists around in a sort of cab in 30+ degrees Centigrade (86+ Fahrenheit). It didn’t seem too bothered, but it was happily chewing on the chain attaching it to a railing. I don’t think it was trying to get away, but it was hard not to imagine it (I would have been).
Scratchy – this is the cat we had when I was a little girl, scratching on a piece of wood which we’d brought back from the New Forest after a camping trip. Why? Because I’d spent several days pretending it was my motorbike (give me a break, I was about four or five years old) and I talked my dad round into bringing it home (Mum was not so keen). At home, the magic dispersed and it became the cat’s scratching post. But I like to think she was clever enough to know it was a motorbike really.
Shallow – again, I had something quite ‘deep’ in mind, but didn’t have the skills (or time) to draw it, so instead, here is a nod to all those summers when I (or later my children) thought they’d actually catch something in a rock pool but never did because the creatures were too clever to be caught.
And Celestial (by now I was back at home with black paper and silver pen) speaks for itself – or does it? All astronomists should look away, but there are the Pegasus and Draco constellations together (possibly unlikely) waiting for me to fly amongst them.
Dangerous, Remove, Beast, Sparkle, Massive, Rush, Fire
Finally we’re into the last week of October/Inktober. By now I was getting tired of working out what to draw, and was, once more, away for a couple of days (it really was that sort of month). By now, the prompts seems even harder to draw. Even though I’d taken photos to help me, it turned out they didn’t. So I had to dig down a bit.
For Dangerous, I remembered when my husband bought a Shun knife and kept telling me (the person who does most of the cooking), every time I cooked (e.g. generally) how sharp it was. One evening, while considering that he should be glad I wasn’t seeing how sharp it was on something other than onions, I rolled my eyes… and sliced into the end of my finger. Glad to say that it healed up fine. Sorry to say that onions aren’t improved by being pink. Will honestly say that my husband and I do not look this young although the expressions are broadly accurate.
Remove was tricky. I had a few ideas including someone removing hate from their heart and being ready to replace it with love, and someone pinching a piece of someone’s jigsaw just as they were about to finish it (sorry – that’s my brain – goes from sentimental to mischievous in the blink of an eye) and then remembered I was going to be drawing while on a train and I couldn’t face trying to draw a jigsaw. Something someone said made me think of masks or make-up and that’s what I decided to draw. I don’t wear much make-up and certainly haven’t worn this much for years, but am really fascinated by make-up artists’ skills and occasionally wonder if they could improve me. Sadly though, at the end of the day it would come off and the real me would be there underneath. The train-ride wasn’t exactly smooth and that’s my excuse for any errors (cough).
Beast was potentially as hard to draw as Demon, but by this point in the challenge, both Liz and I had decided that hands were ‘a beast’ to draw and so I went for the image above. In the pencil sketch I have the right number of finger joints. Somehow when drawing in fine liner, I added one in. This proves the point about drawing hands.
I knew from the outset that I wanted to draw my lovely daughter’s lovely eyes for Sparkle. I categorically didn’t do either the exercise or my daughter justice, but will definitely try it again. I was, by this point, really missing the opportunity to use watercolours or acrylics to add colour, or just use various pencils, but there you go. It’s all a learning curve and I’m glad I can do it without a teacher marking my efforts.
Massive was another where I didn’t quite know what to draw, then we passed a group of tourists queuing to have a birds of prey experience. The birds of prey looked as bored as the horse waiting to cart tourists around (though the temperature was more manageable where I was then). I wondered if they were thinking ‘why do the tourists get all the fun? What if we were big enough to carry them instead of the other way around?’
I had some photos of people on the underground to use as inspiration for Rush, but then thought back to when I was a child and spent time watching nature – the driven clouds, the busy insects, the running river, the the little creatures in the river marching about, oblivious (thankfully) to the adult world of being so head down rushing from A to B. Somewhen I stopped doing that, and am only just starting again.
Finally, for Fire, this is another from Weird & Peculiar Tales – or rather it’s what might happen one day. I have a sort of myth-story in there about when dragons and humans were friends – the humans providing friendship, the dragon providing warmth and protection. Then, because humans are involved, it all goes wrong. This is imagining a future which I think we’d all love – -when we stop fighting and pointing fingers and just sit down together and enjoy friendship and warmth.
So there you have it – a bit of my soul laid bare. As I said before, I’m proud of some of my drawings, not proud of others at all, may retry some, may not with others. But I had a go. It’s back to the writing now, but I’m not going to stop the art. I’m going to keep doing it. Tapping into that part of my brain that likes to tell a quick story and isn’t worrying about judgment feels like going back to a freer, less disciplined me. And that’s not a bad place to visit now and again.
Words and Images (c) Paula Harmon 2023 – not to be used without the author’s express consent.
At the moment, after finishing work (for the moment) on two books simultaneously (listed at the end), my Muse is tempting me from what I’d been planning to write next, towards writing a ‘contemporary’ novel set in an alternative world where there’s also magic and might just include A Novelty, in a slightly different format. Is this something I should do next? Tempting.
It’s also tempting to have some time off. Or at least, to ease up on the drive for creative perfection (or as close to perfection as it’s possible for me to get).
For me, this is where what I shall loosely describe as ‘art’ comes in, because with ‘art’ – I just let my imagination do whatever it fancies without worrying about the end result, even more than I do with cooking (because after all, no one is going to die if I get the art wrong).
We’re obsessed with perfection these days. People compete on television in virtually every field from sport to dressmaking to Lego modelling. Doing something just for itself without anyone getting first prize would not make good TV perhaps, but it’s good for the spirit, and something we seem to have lost the knack for as a culture. I think we should bring it back.
I stopped studying art at school aged fourteen. Years later I tried to learn water-colouring from a book and a few years after that dabbled with acrylics. I sort of stopped again until this year, when Liz Hedgecock suggested we do some art challenges, starting with ones we made up ourselves before moving to ones found online.
I’ll be honest: I’ve enjoyed some challenges/prompts more than others; I’ve been pleased with some results more than other results; I’ve sometimes been more in the mood than other times; other people have liked some things more than other things. But none of those have really been the point. Not for me anyway.
The point for me has been simply having fun in a task where I just enjoy the process, sometimes more than the end result.
There’s always a mental fork in the road as I read the prompt and decide whether I’m going to try and reproduce accurately or make something a little more of an impression; whether it’s going to be serious or quirky. This may depend on subject or time. It may also be something to do with mood as much as subject. But each technique seems to bring out something different.
The soft sounds of a pencil when I’m sketching are calming, and there’s a relief in being able to erase a line that’s gone very wrong.
Watercolours sink into the paper, they build in hue, they’re delicate, dreamlike. The very act of applying them is relaxing. If they go wrong, maybe I can add some ink or other media, or just live with it or decide to try again sometime. Or not.
Acrylics are fun, bold, risky (also hard to get out of a carpet).
Ink is a commitment. It also seems to bring out a slightly surreal side of me which reminds me of my father’s sketching and cartooning.
It’s the process that does me good. My brain switches from all the things that are bothering me, the plot ideas that are fighting for the surface, a desire for perfection. Not all the ones in the image below are that I like or that I think are the best of what I’ve done, or the best I could do.
One – the dark picture with the woman in a long dress – was created to a prompt ‘paint out of your comfort zone’. I had no preliminary sketch as I would do normally, I just painted. I wanted to conjure up some of the contrasts of Edwardian London in the Margaret Demeray books but couldn’t really get across what I was aiming for due to lack of knowledge/skill/time. Do I think it’s good? Nope. Did I find some release in being less disciplined? Yes.
Likewise, the picture of the inside of my writing shed is not even close to what it looks like or how I wanted it to turn out. Everything from perspective to accuracy is wrong, but you know… it captures a moment I guess, and it was fun to bung all those colours down.
The one with the four quadrants is supposed to be an acrylic abstract. I do like that. In my head it represents the four seasons without me really planning it at all. For a control freak, that’s not bad going.
In one stressful week in June, when it was impossible to do any of the writing work I’d planned, the best way I found to centre myself was the ten minutes I spent each day messing about with pencils and/or paints. For a while I just switched off. The street scene with the bunting is one of those paintings.
Last week was even more stressful than that with no art time at all. It was nice yesterday to dig out an ink pen, switch off, tune out of the world and start messing about for the Inktober challenge. So far, it’s tapped straight into perhaps the more surreal side of my subconscious.
If you’re feeling stressed, why not have a go at some art yourself? The back of an envelope and a ballpoint will do if you’ve nothing else to hand.
Or do it in the sand or the mud or some flour on a work top. You don’t need to show anyone. You can destroy it if you want. The important thing is not to judge yourself or let anyone judge what you’ve done.
It’ll just be for you. I promise you, if you turn off your inner critic, that it’ll do you the world of good.
If you want to know where Inktober takes me next, feel free to follow me on Instagram. Just watch out for spiders!
The two books ready for pre-order are Death On The Towpath – book 4 in the Booker & Fitch series written with Liz Hedgecock (releasing on 30/11/23) and Dying To Be Heard – book 4 in the Margaret Demeray series (releasing 14/12/23)
Words and pictures (c) Paula Harmon 2023, not to be used without the author’s express permission.
