Samuel, the Grey Squirrel

The making and writing of Samuel, the grey squirrel and his journey from the ancient woods of Pennsylvania to the grounds of Twyford House in the UK.

Did you know that grey squirrels are non-natives here in the UK? If you follow my work, you will have seen a lot of drawings of squirrels recently. They’ve been a long time coming as I’ve been passionately researching the origins of grey squirrels in Great Britain for years now. This little tale of Samuel the grey squirrel is partly non-fiction and is only one story of many, one aspect of the overall grey squirrel emigration story. I can’t wait to dive deeper still in coming months. I am grateful for John Kelly’s fascinating article in the Washington Post and Jeffrey Rubel’s post in The Curiosity Cabinet, both have been incredibly helpful.

Folktale Week

Folktale Week is a simply magical yearly week of daily prompts on instagram, full of community love and inspiration and this year it ran November 13-19th. 7 prompts were released to be interpreted and illustrated by artists all over the world, using various mediums focusing on a tale (or several). It was the perfect opportunity for me to create artwork and share with more zeal and courage than I normally would (my basic issue: I struggle with perfectionism a lot so I sometimes want to hide and then never publish any of my pieces). But of course I know that’s not how us humans make progress!

I’ve had so many thoughts and feelings about Folktale Week which I’ve been wanting to share but launching with Substack added to the inevitable self doubt and overthinking. That being said, I’ve finally made the time to write a little and I’m so excited to say that I managed to research, plan, create, write and finalise the artwork and words on time to post each day of the challenge. It’s easy to just move on to the next project and not pause to celebrate! All gathered together, this is what my pieces look like on my grid.

Read the story in each caption on Instagram here. I’d love to hear your feedback on it.

The huge benefits of taking part in Folktale Week for me were:

1. You get to learn so much about time management by creating for a deadline. The schedule is defined, the pieces need to be done by the dates of the prompts. And this is similar to working to a commissioned deadline. In this sense, it’s quite reflective of freelance illustration. The project is created, you hand it in, reflect and learn from it. Repeat.

2. There’s a real sense of community. If you give yourself a bit of time each day, you can learn from others’ work. Everyone interprets the prompts in different ways and artists work on tales from all over the world. This diversity is so beautiful and rich, it’s actually quite good for the soul. You also learn from everyone’s feedback on your own work. People find your work and leave comments which are pretty insightful and help you to understand what your voice is, how it’s developing. I’ve made friends during Folktale Week, actual true humans. It’s probably as close as it gets to being a student in an illustration MA.

3. One of my goals this year was to work on developing character movement and show emotion with a view to add a couple pieces to my portfolio - ideally, a dream would be to illustrate and write my own picture book someday. I’m not sure I have what it takes but I intend to try. At least by taking part in a challenge like this, I can be honest with myself and see if I’d enjoy elements of creating picture books (it takes a lot more than this to make a book, of course) or if I’m only in love with the IDEA of it… Too early to tell. I’m self-taught so these are big lessons and big explorations which can way heavily on my shoulders.

Inspiration

I’ve been taking a lot of walks this late Autumn here in Yorkshire and have drawn inspiration from these colours for the palette of the squirrel story. And it was truly wonderful to be in Pennsylvania visiting my brother during the week itself. I have plenty images of this to share at a later date, from my walks in Pennsylvania to a creative meet-up at the MET in (insanely gorgeous) Central Park, NY. More another day.

I drew a lot of houses while in Pennsylvania and enjoyed finding some which were as old as 1770. I also drew inspiration from scenes from the movies The Patriot (2000) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992).

Another fun element about this story was a zine I created prior to the week launch, inspired by some of the zine-making work Sarah Dyer has done over on Patreon lately. This allowed me to start off telling the story, capturing the essence of a tale within the tale. A grandmother sharing a simple story about a grey squirrel with her granddaughter, the setting being an autumnal walk in a British park, surrounded by British architecture. The flip side of the zine is Samuel in his natural habitat over the ocean, far far away, somewhere in the backwoods of Pennsylvania. You can see the video of this on Instagram here.

Learning from Folktale Week 2021 - Cinderella in Edinburgh

2 years ago I drew 7 illustrations of Perrault’s Cinderella with Edinburgh as her setting. The process of researching the architecture and interiors of old Edinburgh houses was so fun. After publishing my colouring book of Edinburgh, I knew a lot of the town so well. My favourite part of this was deciding on a route she’d run from the castle after midnight. My main materials for the project were gouache painting on Arches watercolour paper. I learnt a lot through the process and of course would change so much of it now but the main shift for this year was a different use of materials, from using more freely watercolour, pens and pencils to a variety of paper. Some of my pieces this year were in a sketchbook, some were on very light weight printing paper. My idea was to be more relaxed and free and not sense the weight of the cost of each brush stroke!!

Cinderella in Edinburgh was a lovely project and I can still remember what podcasts and music I was listening to while making those pieces. It stands out so clearly in my memory as a body of work with a beginning, middle and end. I’d love to revisit this tale someday again and adapt it to a new set of materials and methodology, putting into practise all I’ve learnt since.

Until next year…

FolktaleWeek 2023 was organised and monitored by a group of illustrators and anyone could take part by posting on Instagram using custom hashtags for each prompt. I’d love to know if you took part or if you followed along and found some new favourite illustrators. If you love reading folk tales, I highly recommend making yourself a cup of tea and spending some cozy time reading through some of the tales illustrators have worked on. I can’t wait for next year’s already.

Talk soon,

Helen x