This month three of last year’s Illustration graduates, Drew Starling, Felix Miall and Hari Connor, took part in the Stojkow Arts Residency Programme in rural Poland where they were able to do lots of drawing and gather inspiration for upcoming projects. In this week’s blog post Hari shares her experience and some of her lovely work created during her week-long residency.
The residency is on this beautiful farm in the rural south of Poland, surrounded by meadows, rivers and forests. I love going out of the city to work on drawings at a slower pace, and I’m always inspired by nature and by making work together with other creatives. I’m really interested in observational drawing as an exercise, how the process of drawing changes how you interact with a place, making you slow down and appreciate tiny details, and how the final artwork can reflect one’s experience of the space. It’s also really interesting travelling and working with other illustrators, and seeing how different artists’ interpretations of the same landscape or object can completely vary.
I’m currently putting together a new book called ‘The Way I See It’ that collects my observational drawings from the last few years chronologically, finishing up with the work from this trip. The book will be small, and include notes and prose that I wrote at the time – I wanted to recreate the feeling of handling something personal and intimate that you get when looking through someone’s sketchbook.
The book has gone to print, and should be arriving next week in time for launch at Glasgow Comic Con – I’ll be selling it online and bringing it to Thought Bubble after that. I’m doing a new, experimental comic that includes a huge amount of natural scenery and plants, but I’ve only sold short zines of my observational drawings before, so I’m really interested to see what people think of it in comics circles!
Stojkow Arts Residency Programme was set up by Jessica Kettle who graduated from ECA Illustration in 2014. For more information email jessicakettle10@gmail.com.
