Our North Wales Residency

I had the absolute pleasure of going on my first art residency this autumn with some friends! We headed from Edinburgh to a small village in North Wales called Corris. Having grown up in Cardiff I was ashamed to say that this was my first time visiting North Wales, but it won’t be my last. It was gorgeous, especially being surrounded by all the autumn colours and having 4 days to dedicate to creating and exploring was amazing.

We stayed at Stiwdio Maelor and had a lovely big attic space where we could create, be messy, drink coffee and wine. What more would you want.

I had no real expectation of what the week would hold, I didn’t want to put pressure on myself to create a new body of work or do a certain amount, I just wanted to have some headspace, get outside and enjoy creating with my pals.

A few evenings of the trip we did some group workshops, a collage one to start the trip and then we played around using the pasta machine to do some tetrapak printing! I really enjoyed these, seeing how differently we all work and how our styles translate to each medium.

My favourite thing of all was that the welsh weather was on our side, clear skies and no rain meant I got to go out and do a lot of walking and sketching. During this trip I went out around the local area, picked a spot and sat there for a while, I wanted to experiment with watercolour and indian ink and try to capture the essence of the landscape quickly. I was using my Pith landscape sketchbook whic was PERFECT, I started by doing a very loose but bright watercolour wash-I was trying to capture all the colours I saw and then I went in with my bamboo stick to draw on top of this. When using ink and a bamboo nib there is only so much control you have over ink flow and this helped me to let go of over controlling the stroke and created some lovely organic lines.

I cannot wait to go on another so I am keeping my eyes peeled for a Scottish one!