Sommerferie

It's that time of year when most of Scandinavia goes on holiday and we were no different. A visit to the in-laws followed by 3 days with one of Thomas' - and now my - friends was a much needed break, and opportunity to visit Sørlandet, the southern country, in Aust-Agder and Telemark. I thought I'd share some of the photos of the area we stayed in so that people who haven't been here have opportunity to see another part of Norway, away from the huge mountains and vast fjords of the west, and to see how pretty this area is. I also thought it might be interesting to see some photos and sketches together; differences will be quite apparent in what I've chosen to focus on or leave out, or to add in something that might not be there!

Appropriately, having arrived by water taxi, I drew a sketch from a kart of the area. It was a chart for boats, but in Norway maps are called 'kart'. It reminded me very much of the maps in the books of The Swallows and Amazons, The Famous Five or even Narnia. I added in a couple of extras that you wouldn't find on the boating map...

This was really fun to do, adding in potential camp sites, wreck sites and the odd Viking ship!

The place we stayed in was lovely; our friend's family hytte with a view over the islets and twists of rocky coastlines. It'd be a sailing paradise here with plenty of anchorage points and sheltered spots, although it could get a little busy with sometimes 5 or 6 boats!

The view from there to the boathouse was irresistible to sketch. The red painted wooden building (the same tone seems to be used throughout the country which gives a sense of unity), with the contrasting white window frames made it seem very much like a fairy tale.

In my sketch there's a slightly conspicuous white area; I still haven't come back to finish the boat off! I took a bit of artistic liberty with my sketch and reduced the number of windows and length of the boat house which was now more suitable for a rowing dinghy rather than a motor cruiser!




The colours people use to decorate their homes with are often very sympathetic to nature and seem to echo those you'd find in the environment. A mustard yellow on a nearby property could be found in the lichens on the rocks.

I liked the angles the two buildings in this photo presented so I made a rough sketch of them. Seeing the photo and the sketch next to one another, my eyes fall to obvious errors, but one of the 'fun' aspects of sketching is educating your brain to see what actually is there, rather than what you think is there. That said, I'm not sure I'd change it because I like the shapes as they are!

For a totally different feel, I sat on the terrace and sketched a small bay across from us, noticing how the tide changed. Tides here only change by about 50 cm, totally different to the UK, and another different I was interested to read about was how the salinity of the sea here is much less than the UK waters too. People tend to just live here in the summer months, partly because the sea ices over in the winter and so it becomes difficult to live here year-round. (My own private dream is not put off by that!).

One afternoon, Thomas and our friend went out kayaking so I took a small rowing dinghy across the small passage of water and nestled it at low tide, wedging the oars against the boat in thick, dark green, muddy sand. A swan paddled its way gracefully towards me but started hissing, though not at me. I turned around in time to see the shiny dark mahogany back of an adult mink, scuttling over the bank. Our friend mentioned that she'd seen baby mink under her hytte so I was really pleased to see one, although like ferrets and stoats, they are pretty voracious predators.

One of the aspects I really like about being near the water, is realising the importance of it for travel and exploration. That feeling must have been experienced by all sorts of different cultures and civilisations (not least the Vikings). For me, it was really interesting to see where we were staying from a totally different perspective, to understand more the lie of the land, the flow of the water, and to gain that fantastic feeling of travelling in a totally different way. Rowing was fun too; it's been many long years since I've done any and the coordination and strength in my right compared to left side, made the boat tend to want to circle rather than go straight. Just thinking about it now makes me grin!

It was really pleasant to be wedged in my boat, looking back to the hytte and at Thomas getting the kayaks ready while I was already sketching. In the photo you can also see the Tarp Tent Double Rainbow, set up and ready for me to curse at as I seam sealed it the following day...

Back to the present, I started the sketch on the boat, enjoying the buffeting of waves against me as slightly larger motor boats went by, mostly just small ribs with outboards, taking their cap'ns to Kragerø or nearby hamlets for provisions. Trying to make sense of the mass of boulders and rocks, and background trees and foliage was challenging, but I really enjoyed trying to embed the hytte into its surroundings much as our friend's Dad had done as he extended it from it's original wash house status into a 3 bedroomed cabin with kitchen and stue (living area). I really liked using the bushes at the front, making them creep over the white palings, which they did in real life; we were surrounded by lilac and gooseberry bushes!

I finished the sketch later on that day, sat in the living room, creating foliage and boulders and lichen out of my imagination. It was meditative and generally speaking, the act of sketching so much in these few short days helped me feel as if I'd had a much longer break. The challenge for me remains though; to do more sketching when not in such sublime company or environments!

Rondane Sketching

In June we went to Rondane, a National Park in Norway. Although June, it wasn't quite summer up there, although the valleys were noticeably warmer than the mountains which still had a decent amount of snow when we first sighted them at the start of the week.

Thomas had a bad cold, donated by someone from work two days before we left, so it was a bit like being in the twilight zone, up on the side of a mountain in a hytte, without transport other than Shanks pony, and not really feeling much in the mood for that either!

However I did make a few sketches of the place which I thought I'd post up here.

It's interesting to make sketches as well as photographs when you go on holiday. I'm not decrying photos by any means, but the level of intimacy you might gain from spending up to 2 hours sketching something and trying to work out spacial relationships, does give a different feel for me, as I look back on the holiday while writing these few words.

This was an early sketch of the view from the hytte we stayed in, in the foothills just before where the official border of the National Park lay. It didn't turn out anything like the view I had in my minds eye, but looking at it now, the water marks at the bottom remind me very much of all the mist and rain in the valley...

This was just done in pencil on some really nice -and cheap! - cartridge paper. It's a view straight into the mouth of the Rondane, capturing only some of the broad sweep of the range that you can see from here. We'd gone on a little walk on the recommendation of a guy we met and the view was just fabulous, across lakes into the heart of the mountains, or at least the promise of them!

When we'd been to a similar point before to have a look we couldn't see the peaks, just white mist which blanketed  the views. We had, however, had the tease of a view on our journey up to the hytte, but it was about 3 or 4 days until it decided to show itself. It is a popular view with the local hotel having a version in paint, and actually now I recall, the hytte had it's own version too!

 Looking over the valley later in the week we determined that one of the hills across from us was called Svartkampen, and when we were lucky enough that the weather cleared we could see over to the Jotunheim range, which Andrew was to venture into the following weekend. Knowing this, we were watchful of the snow cover; when the cloud lifted we could see broad sweeps of snow all over the mountains beyond this ridge, all looking pretty arctic! Andrew related his story here; it's well worth a read!

Closer and closer to 'home', one of the views that captured me, and made me sign the theme tune to Heidi in my head for a good 5 days, was the view down the hill to an old barn. The hytte that we were staying in was part of a 200 year old farm; there was another hytte with two sheds between us and it, as well as this barn further down the hill in the middle of a field. The field was steep, surrounded by pines, but the spring grass was lush and flowers were waking up around the hedges / scrub. The barn stood out for me though and finally I sketched it. Thomas remarked that it reminded him of the wild west, and I can see what he means; it was very rustic, built in traditional log cabin style - which you still see much evidence of!

Curiously, the view along the road was especially seductive for me (I can imagine people saying, "What, you'd rather sketch a road than the mountains!"). I liked the mystery of the road curving, rising and then falling out of sight into the darkness of age old spruce and fur trees, making me daydream about other universes and worm holes and such (I watch too much sci-fi!). I loved sketching this and was completely enveloped for a couple of hours. The fence posts were more numerous than I've included, although they formed a lovely shape themselves, but including them could have foreshortened the view and 'stopped' the viewer's eyes from roaming. If I sketched it again I might leave them out altogether...

Finally, this was my last sketch from the holiday, done as we were waiting for the bus to take us on a long drive back to Oslo. We were at the 'Sinclair Hotel', the plaque illustrated below marking 400 years since a war with the Scots! It was just a quick, 20 minute sketch but I was happy enough with the result. Certainly all the sketches I did on holiday (I think) improved over time, and something of a style started to emerge; rather illustrative, but I quite like that; it reminds me of old paperbacks I used to read as a kid, with lovely line drawings.

One of the things I've taken from this is how portable a simple set of basic watercolour pencils and 2, 2B pencils are. A brush with a bit of water from a bottle or cup to smear the colour around if wanted, a sketch pad that fits in a small bag (I really like my Z-Packs Multipack!) and you're away. Plus, the memories of the place remain very vivid for me; the place itself and the feelings of exploration and discovery, in this case without so much use of my legs! Reviewing the sketches now, I definitely want to explore more pencil work of mountains; but until I'm back in the bigger hills I'm looking forward to sketching more around Oslo, maybe even the city itself, as well as the marka and surrounds.