Signs

Sheep, sheep signs, zig-zagging road signs, zig-zagging roads, and a Scottish paper bag.

Yet More Holiday Pages!

On the Isle of Raasay it rained and we saw a mermaid-only stone but I am sure the real ones were there somewhere hiding. We went for a walk in the rain and seemed to have the place to ourselves. At the end of our walk we found a lovely and cosy cafe-part of an outdoor adventure type hotel. The food was lovely-the perfect end to a rainy walk! The map on the right hand page pulls out concertina style.

We drove to visit the Talisker distillery and on the way saw lots of scarecrows. It was a village wide effort and every house and farm had one. This is Jessie, the scarecrow at the local primary school.

This is the beach at Glen Brittle. Another quite hairy drive to get there, but worth it as it was a beautiful place. The sand is black-volcanic. It had intricate patterns and there was a large seabird skeleton looking most dramatic. The mountains are just behind the beach and looked black and moody, with mist at their base, and cloud at their summits, on the day we went. The only slight downside was the lack of a public toilet! The mean campsite people keep theirs locked apart from for residents, even though it is marked as a pc (public convenience) on the map! Ah well, the walk on the beach was a bit shorter than I would have liked!

Page one-a visit to Portree, the main town. The lion is in the town square.

Page two is a photo of the post office on the mainland in a place called Knoydart. The Old Forge was the pub we were there to visit-it was a deal where you get a boat at 5.30 from Armadale, have a meal, and get the boat back at 9.00. It was a good boat trip. Andy caused false excitement when he spotted a rock, but thought it was a seal! Knoydart is about half an hour from Skye by boat, and is on the mainland, but there are not any roads out of there-an eighteen mile hike will get you to the nearest civilisation!

Glossy postcards peel off the card backing quite easily, and so use up less space in the book. The page on the left is just the page-no relevance to the holiday. I painted it and it just sat in a drawer with no purpose until it became a page in Erewhon.
This is Elgol, and the rocks I found there. The black one is so smooth.
Such a dramatic drive to get there.

Felted balls I made while away, An absolutely gorgeous and cuddly looking bull, and a refelceted mountain.

Weird Little Beach FInd and a Fairy Flag

The beach find is like horsetail in the way it joins together but seems to be made of a calcium like substance. Perhaps it is fossilised horsetail! I found some on another beach, but didn't keep it as it fell apart. I was more careful with this piece, which I found on the beach near the house. I stuck it to the see through tracing paper page on the back of a sticky pogo print. It has lasted remarkably well so far. Dunvegan is the ancestral home of Clan MacLeod. The most interesting thing, I thought, was the Fairy Flag, which has a number of stories attached to it about its origin. Wherever it came from, it has been held as a good luck symbol for the MacLeods since they acquired it, and has traditionally been taken into battle with them. All that remains of the flag is a very fragile piece of cloth, now encased in a frame behind glass.

Here is my version, using a little ripped section of sari fabric. The remaining piece of flag has little circular red darned patches. The portrait is one of the lairds of the clan and is cut out of a postcard.

Sunsets, Beaches and Herons

There were lovely sunsets each evening, and, where we were staying, on Broadford Bay, was perfect for viewing them. The house had a little conservatory so you could sit and enjoy the view even when it was getting chilly, or the midges were biting!

This page is photos from our walk to the coral beach. Not really coral, but algae doing a good impression. From a distance it looks like white sand, but up close there are thousands of tiny coral like pieces mixed with shells-also tiny.

More wildlife. You can see the back of a ticket to Dunvegan castle as the page is tracing paper. It is useful as you can see both sides of things such as tickets.

Holiday Pages

I used the Pogo printer a lot on holiday. There were so many lovely scenes of sea, sky and mountains, and so many birds to photograph too. The little dog on this page is called Ella and was a very naughty little dog! She loved chasing the birds so had a lot of fun and didn't come back very quickly when called.
We went to a place where fairies lived in the trees-felt fairies I might add. Skye has many stories about fairies and I wrote some of my favourite ones down.
We saw some good rainbows too. The other side of this page is made from wrapping paper-as was the egg page the other day. I love this paper and didn't want to cover it up!

More creatures. A hooded crow, common gull, oyster catcher, rabbit, heron and wagtail.

Skye Holiday

The view from our holiday cottage.

2nd attempt at the view!

The faces are from a book of Holbein pictures. The first is on a tracing paper page so I coloured underneath with pastel chalks. The writing is recording some of the mileage and distances on our holiday. It was a very long drive! The next load of pages will all be holiday ones so I will do a few a day I think.

Bad Science

A cinema ticket from the summer-I loved this film! Then on the other side I was trying out a suddenly realised thing-which I am pretty sure other people have thought about, but somehow it never struck me. That is, that the colours of the rainbow mix to make secondary colours in between the pairs. Red orange yellow green blue indigo violet. As in red and yellow make orange, yellow and blue-green and violet and blue-indigo(I think!) It isn't perfect, as purple is not there. I suppose the colours are not mixing really as the rainbow is light split up into colours, but it makes sense to me!

Fox

Here is my fox, done in gouache. He is opposite a page which I did, after driving around the local area, the day after the riots. The stripey patterns in the background are the shutters on all of the shops. The face is a rubber stamp I made a while ago.

Coloured Circles

Colour mixing circular fun. Each of my gouache colours, on its own, then mixed with white, on two different coloured page backgrounds. At the bottom some doodly patterny flowers.

Chalk Face

A Pastel chalk face. I did the outline of the face in a dark colour first. It is from an image I saw on Abundance, which is filled with beautiful, thought provoking pictures and quotes. Today it has music too! If you click on the picture you can see details of the source written on the other page.
Tonight I came home and drew a small cactus in the book, and then a weird looking face with big round eyes (I have just received some doll making eyes which are as big as mine and was thinking about that). I drew with no tv or radio on, just the sound of the rain. I should do that more often. I am one to have background noise, but on the few occasions I don't it is lovely! Perhaps like meditation-I don't know as I have not meditated, but I thought it might be.
An aside-'chalk face' is a term for teaching-as in working at the chalk face. Not anymore with the advent of smartboards. In my classroom I have a non-working smartboard and no blackboard but hey-ho!
I have now reached the end of my photos of the book, though the book itself is nearly finished. I will take some more soon to show you.

Teabags

Teabag experimentation page. Painted with watercolours, inked background, stuck down with Matt medium. I have been saving teabags for ages now but have not used many. I like the absorbent nature of the paper as the colour just spreads out really quickly. I also like the transparency of them which means they are good to layer. I like these things, but have not explored them very far!