Drawing Sumburgh

~Shetland Nature Festival, ‘Drawing Sumburgh’, 2nd August 2018 ~

Here are a few drawings from last week’s workshop. We began with quick warm-up drawings focusing on small details of the landscape. As the whole panoramic view from Sumburgh is quite daunting at first to draw, this allowed us to start tracing lines and forms, and to start really looking at our surroundings. 

We then moved around the headland. At the side facing south towards the ‘Roost’, the churning seas where tidal streams meet, are dramatic stacks. We spoke here about the difficulty of drawing rock. Some participants chose to focus in on detail and texture, whereas others traced the stacks’ dramatic silhouettes. I found all the lights and darks that these cliff-forms created very interesting, and by seeing faces and shelves and edges whilst drawing them, you start to think about them as more 3D forms, and to be less overwhelmed by their complexity. 

We not only used pencil but also ink and charcoal. Ink allows us to cover large areas of the paper quite quickly and so to establish depth and tone. In the final drawing here, I was trying to capture the afternoon sun catching only particular edges of rock in the cliffs - the rest was thrown in deep shadow. 

With many thanks to those that came along, and also to everyone at Sumburgh Head.