Currently I am working on a project for Dundee Rep, creating illustrations to accompany a new story written by Vivian French. Mammy McArthur’s Little Grey Mouse will be read to tiny wee baby children in a series of theatrical story-telling events throughout the festive season. In other news, I have recently rediscovered dip pens and am delighting in this wonderfully unpredictable and satisfying medium. I used dip pen and fine liner to design a poster for an upcoming multicultural fair, combining Western festive imagery and Middle Eastern mehndi style designs and patterns.

As an Artist in Residence I visit Edinburgh every Friday (I live in Dundee) to draw in the museum or zoo and to reconnect with the chatter of the studio. The residency is intrinsic to the evolution of my practice as it necessitates leaving home and working on ideas in a different environment. Listening in on studio meetings, wandering around the college library or even browsing the shop can spark ideas and push a project in a direction previously unconsidered.

Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Sorcha and I have just graduated from ECA this year.

I feel like my residency has kicked off to a good start. At the end of September, I helped a group of the 4^th years run an afternoon workshop at Portobello High School as part of their Literary Festival. The aim was to give them an idea of what Illustration is (an ambitious thing to do in a two hour workshop!) We started off by playing Game of Consequences, partly because it is a great excuse to play a fun game, but also to demonstrate the strong connection illustration has to storytelling and how words and images can both feed each other when creating narratives. Later on we asked the students to draw each other expressing various emotions. They seemed to really enjoy the workshop and it was great to see all the exciting and playful images that they made.

In terms of my own work, I have been spending most of my time in the print room. My main focus for this year is to just continue experimenting with various print processes whilst I have access to these amazing facilities. I have mainly been mono printing, which has been great after not doing it to four months. I also want to experiment more with screen printing and see how some of my handmade, textural drawings are translated through this medium. I am excited to see how my work will develop over the course of the year.

Hello there!

So this month I began my post as Illustrator in Residence at Edinburgh College of Art. Having graduated two years ago, it still feels a little strange yet wonderful to be in an academic, busy studio environment. So far, I absolutely love it.

I have spent the past few weeks getting back into the swing of life drawing, and I find having two and a half hours each Monday morning really sets me up for the rest of the week!

Every other day, I am fully committed to working on my long-term project to ‘dissect’ space, architecture, time and narrative in existing films through drawing and animation. My ambition with this project is to take the experimental drawings I create throughout the year, and put them back into film space and time, by painting directly onto a television thus creating new narratives and an experimental animation from something pre-existing. I am really excited about it, and have been experimenting with rule-based drawing using gouache on acetate.

If you would like to see more of my work or processes, visit

http://betweenhereandnowhere.wordpress.com/