ORKNEY

At the end of September this year, I went on the trip to Orkney along with the rest of 3rd year illustration. Although I've visited quite a few places in the highlands I'd never visited Orkney before, and it was the furthest north I've ever been. Having been to other islands like Harris and Skye, I expected it to be pretty similar. In some ways it was, though it was maybe not quite as picturesque and I was actually surprised at how built up and urbanised it was in comparison. However this made for some pretty interesting opportunities to explore several villages and the ancient buildings nested inside them.

A garden in Stromness.

One of my favourite days was the day we got a bus to the neighbouring harbour village of Stromness, which was extremely quaint and picturesque, where we spent the afternoon exploring its thrift stores and twisty little lanes, and ate lots of junk food on the harbour drawing boats. It was also home to several museums and art galleries - one of which had a wall dedicated to some excellent zines made by the local school kids. Some of them were pretty cute, and others were incomprehensibly strange/hilarious.

I don't know.

The main purpose of the trip though was to work with Papdale primary school in Kirkwall to produce a sea monster themed story book with their younger pupils. Although we had done a similar project last year in Edinburgh I was a little apprehensive since I don't think I'm really that great with children, however I actually really enjoyed working with the kids there (even though one of them insisted on drawing boobs on all my drawings).

Overall I'm really grateful I had the opportunity to visit Orkney and spend time with people in a place that is so drastically different from Edinburgh - it was kind of refreshing not having any phone or internet signal for a week and even though the weather was pretty bleak at times it was nice to spend so much time outdoors, which isn't something you get to do so often back home.