Frozen Trolls And Black Sand

Now that I’ve had a bit of sleep, I’ve been looking through the drawings I did in Iceland. I prefer to draw when I’m travelling because the memories are more vivid than when I’ve just taken photos. Olaf  The Guide and Otto The Driver (on a sabbatical from Springfield, obviously) took us to a lovely little town, Vik on the South coast.  As Iceland is basically a great big load of volcanoes, the sand is pounded lava and it’s black. It’s beautiful. So dramatic. Off the coast is a stack formation known as the Trolls. Legend has it that two trolls were trying to tug a ship back to their cave when the sun rose. As everyone knows, sunlight turns trolls to stone. So there they stand, frozen forever.

I prepared a selection of drawing materials before I went because I didn’t know what the climate was going to be like. Here’s a piece of A4 hand-made paper that I bought from the Tate gallery. I coated it with two layers of acrylic gesso and taped a piece of acid-free tissue over it, so that it wouldn’t smudge during the journey. I did the drawing (very quickly – it was freezing) in black and white oil bars but I wasn’t particularly happy with it so I smoothed the tissue over and left it in my bag. When I looked at it later, the tissue had stuck and it looked much better. So I left it on and redrew the outlines with compressed charcoal.The sea is actually paler than the velvety black sand.

Here’s a photo of the black beach and the Trolls taken by Husb.