Get-away into nowhere-land
Somewhere in the middle of nowhere...
… I found a tiny house & booked two nights in it! It was three hours away from where I live, in the swedish forest, with nothing around, in a village of 80 people.
I recently felt that I want to retrieve, get some quiet time and a digital-detox to get a bit back to myself, reconnect & see how it feels to just be by myself, for myself, in the middle of nowhere.
It was awesome! Imagine you stop walking on the snow, and you hear nothing! Absolutely nothing! Complete quietness, calmness…while you are surrounded by wild forest. I loved it so much, even saw Northern Lights, cos guess what: no noise also often means no light pollution & the sky is as clear and bright as it could be.
Wonderful, absolutely wonderful!
So today I will take you with me on a little travel journal, which will be lots of sketches I made into my tiny sketchbook while I was walking around. I only met ONE cross-country skier, in the two days I was there.
Anyways, I stayed in a tiny house which was just soooo cozy, I loved to live in it:
My view from the window was to the main house of the owners of this campsite & tiny house, who were just super lovely! Amazing hosts! I decided to draw their house & gift it to them as a present to show how grateful I was for these couple of days with them.
I felt very inspired to draw and paint a lot somehow. I usually am not drawn to architecture or buildings, but somehow this one was so lovely to look at, here a close up of it, with proper lightning (I still need to figrue out how to take proper photos of my drawings in different conditions, not as easy…):
While I was walking in nature, I also had my mini-sketchbook with me &felt inspired to draw some sceneries. Some of them were again quite surprising to me.
Somehow in those moments I felt like I wanted to capture them, partially because they felt surreal and partially because I felt like I wanted to honor these spots.
Let’s start with the first one, a random shed, covered in snow, completely distorted and broken on all ends. Yet it was still standing, no matter what.
I wondered when it would fully collapse and become a pile of old wood tha twould rot away…
Behind this shed, was this super cute, surreal and funny looking old, rusty tractor. It made me smile because it looked like it had jumped out of a kids movie, with its lights serving as eyes, looking curious into the world. One eye with the lamp still inside, the other one without it.
It had this baby-blue color and light pink writing and together with the rust all over everywhere, it had a very strange flair of old and new. Young and aged. Funny and sad.
I am not a fan of motorized vehicles, at all. Any of them. Yet, somehow this old little charming, rusting tractor made me feel something, a type of sympathy towards it. I cant explain it better, here is my drawing of it:
Further down the road, I heard water splashing around & when I turned around a corner, there was this little opening of a river, looking like a pond. Surrounded with snow and ice and bend trees spanning from one side to the other.
It was a very tricky perspective to draw, still not sure if I managed to capture it. I also wondered how to depict the water, as it was brown, but actually water is see-through, and actually often painted in blue… the dilemma of an artist :D
In the end I decided to make a mix of blue and brown and a bit of white. Et voila:
When you walk around in the wilderness here, you might often encounter these very old, broken and distorted sheds. Every time I pass one, I wonder what it has been used for in the past.
Someone build it there for a reason and somehow over time, it has been left alone, living and rotting away. I guess still being a shelter for animals during the whole year.
Here the second shed I found, it somehow fitted perfectly into its surrounding and this tiny tree on the left, breaking through the snow was an interesting counterbalance to it. Or there was something about it, that I needed to draw it too. Because you know, these drawings are not anatomically correct, obviously… I hope that is visible :D
But the point to make them is, to capture the flair and soul and moment of a scenery and situation. It doesn’t have to be perfectly correct, the amount of trees, branches, the angle of the shed etc. are just a rough estimate. What I want is to capture the essence of what I see, in the easiest way.
So here we go again:
Last but not least, we have a snowed in car and a bridge that looked so cute and ridiculous at the same time. It was made 12 years ago and the signs were really cute, embellished with drawings and decorated very pretty.
The car just looked ridiculous, it was standing in the middle of a field, surrounded by snow, looking like it was floating there. Again, I am not a fan of cars and such, but I really had to draw it, because it made me smile :D
These were my impressions of my two days get-away. I loved it!
I also loved the disconnection from the digital world, the online fuzz, the screens and just be in nature, walk, play with my dog, read, take naps and paint.
I will try to take more often time-outs from the digital space, not sure yet how to do that best, cos I also think social media are great for certain aspects of my life.
We will see, time will tell.
Another thing I wanted to share is, that I learned to embrace my drawing and painting skills a bit more. In the past would have been ashamed to show these scribbles. Not anymore now. I love them, each one of them.
Even though they are not perfect, even though they have objects I am not a fan of, even though I see flaws in them: all that doesnt matter. What matters is that I connect a happy & grateful feeling with them & that they make me remember a precious time.
I really feel a lot of value doing that and I wish more people would dare to embrace this type of a activity & feel how well it does them. All it needs is a pen and paper. And looking at your surrounding & picking something to draw. Thats it.
There is no need for perfection. Those scribbles I made are more than good enough!
Would you want to do such drawing activities together?
Love,
Daria