Maps

My drawing and painting adventures have gone done an unexpected rabbit hole as I have been sidetracked by maps. I think it began when we went to the National Portrait Gallery and saw the Shakespeare to Winehouse exhibition from the National Portrait Gallery in London ... which I haven't mentioned and which was AMAZING. Not just because of the quality of the art, and the incredible range of subjects, but because it had some of the iconic portraits that I have always known about but never really thought I would get to see in the flesh. 

The Shakespeare one is probably the classic but they also had the Bronte sisters portrait done by Branwell, which is reproduced in every single one of the biographies I have read ... my husband didn't quite get why I stood in front of a pretty bad slightly ripped up portrait for so long, but I was just fascinated. 

And a sunny Saturday afternoon in Canberra meant basically no-one there, so I could visit with the pictures as much as I wanted, and as close as I wanted! Heaven. But we always pick one out to take home, if we could, and decided we would most like the Charles Dickens. No-one offered us our choice of picture to keep, but we like to have our answer ready to hand, just in case. 

Anyway the link to maps is Grayson Perry's A Map of Days which was in the exhibition, and fabulous, and worth the time we spent in front of it looking at all the detail. It made me think of those maps in the front of fantasy novels, which I have always loved, and of course the road maps we used to do as kids, and how much fun it was.

So I turned to the internet which is unsurprisingly STUFFED FULL of people who like to draw maps, and share their maps, and use their maps for games, and scan old maps which is perhaps the biggest rabbit-hole of them all! I figured the best way to start was was just to start scrawling whatever was out there in my sketchbook while watching Netflix. And that is where I am at the moment - although I have started a Domestika course on how to draw isometric buildings, which is awesome, and when my isometric graph paper arrives I will have a go at that. Yes, this is hyper-fixated neurodivergence. Or, as my husband and I like to call it, Having A Hobby.