November: My First Folktale Week
This is the first November that I’ve taken part in Folktale Week, which is a challenge hosted on Instagram. Each year, they release seven prompts in October for people to use as a stimulus to make something. I have always loved seeing how others use the prompts and so this year I thought I would give the challenge a go myself.
I thought I could share how I used the prompts to develop artwork and a story, just because I learnt a lot from the process as a whole and know there will be things that I know now, that I will (fingers crossed) remember for next year.
To start off with, I wrote the prompts down on my phone and came back to them every once in a while, when I was on the train or eating lunch. I'll be honest, I found trying to fit in all of the prompts really challenging and found myself making rules around them - something that I’ve started to notice myself doing in other work, maybe I’ll have to do a bit of introspection and write a blog post about rules and breaking rules (hopefully) in January. I think I was staring at them on the train with about a week to go until the first prompt was due to be posted, when I thought that breaking the ‘rules’ and mixing it up might be OK.
The first thing I did was group the prompts. I immediately liked lost and found together and ‘sea’ gave me a setting. Deciding that posting seven times might be a bit too much of a challenge for me this year, I created three groups and wrote the prompts out in their groups, in my sketchbook.
Lost, ink,
sea, sleep, underground
Illusion, found
The first line ‘They were called Lost and Found’ came quite naturally, and even though I was a bit worried that I’d taken the first and the last prompt. I decided if the characters ran through the whole story, then it would be OK, and anyway, I’d already decided the break the rules a little bit.
Once I had my two characters, I placed them within my setting. I wanted it to be a bit of a spooky sea scene, with two children building a sandcastle in the shadow of an eerie house. Looking back, I think I pulled quite a lot from my observational drawing in Cornwall and Bute over the summer, and I can see how my Orange Shell drawings also fed into this narrative.
I justified ‘underground’ as if you go below sea level, you are technically underground. But even I don’t think the fact that I hid a tiny ink bottle in amongst the shells counted as including ‘ink’ (scroll down to spot). That said, I think the prompts are there as a starting point and I decided that if ‘ink’ and ‘illusion’ didn’t quite fit, then it would be OK.
After creating my initial sketch on the train the second line sort of came as a bit of a link between the children, the land and the sea, ‘When Lost left things behind, Found was always close by’. I used my iPad to make rough sketches - this is something I’ve only started doing this year and it’s really helped with my MA work. I know I like my first ideas to be on paper and in my sketchbook, but I like the quickness of being able to change and edit rough drawings digitally.
I found the final part the hardest, as I knew I wanted one child to be on the land and the other to be in the sea, with the shell as a connecting factor. At first I had written, ‘And whilst Lost slept at night, Found protected their dreams’ But found that a bit jarring so switched ‘slept’ for ‘swam’ and drew Lost as a sleeping mermaid. I also decided that the dream element didn’t have to be stated - they were both asleep and it could all just be an ‘illusion’ which fit in with the prompts.
This year, I have loved experimenting with paper cutting and folding, so I felt really excited about the prospect of working out a concertina fold for Folktale Week. I initially made a very, very small version to make sure that all the bits matched up, which they didn’t at first. It was really hard to work out how to keep the scale of the mermaid tale, whilst not giving anything away on the other side of the concertina fold. I think If you looked closely, after seeing the reverse side you would notice that one of the rocks looks suspiciously fish-tale like, but part of me quite likes that. I think maybe it fits with the slightly eerie world I tried to create, and perhaps it fits with the ‘illusion’ prompt after all?
For a little while, I thought I might use the tiny practise as the finished piece, but I felt that the tiny shell details were really important and so decided to scale it up. To make the piece, I took a page out of my big A3 Moleskine sketchbook, folded it and cut is, using the practise as a guide. This was quite helpful as the folds in the small concertina worked a bit like a grid for the big concertina. I painted it using a mix of gouache and watercolour and then drew on top of it using my pencils from my pencil case. I think the most challenging thing for me was making sure I had got the tone and the value right. I needed to make sure that the dark parts were really, really dark. I also needed to paint the water - it occurred to me that I usually leave it as negative space when I’m drawing in my sketchbook, so I worked at layering up really thin layers of gouache, something I might try again when I’m on location.
This is how the story worked out in the end,
They were called Lost and Found.
When Lost left things behind, Found was always close by.
And whilst Lost swam, Found waited for her to come home.
I really enjoyed the challenge this year and found it helped me to look at my university project with fresh eyes, which can only be a good thing. If this challenge is something you’re interested in then you should definitely have a look at the Folktale Week Instagram page and I know that Sarah Dyer does a lot of great things on Patreon around Folktale week. I also made a little video and posted it on Instagram, which you can see here.
See you next month,
Lucy x