Blog post: 3 March 2025

Digital drawing is a trick?

Print Residency - 29th July - 8th August 2024, Dumfries House, Scotland.

In July 2024, I had a fabulous opportunity to join alumni from the Royal Drawing School on a print residency at Dumfries House. This was to include precious time in the print room, an opportunity to draw en plein air on a stunning estate of 2,000 acres and work as an Artist in Residence in the 18th-century house.

Aside from the beauty of the grounds, the facilities are quite simply awesome, with each artist afforded a dedicated studio space and access to a print room made in heaven. All the printing activities at Dumfries House were carried out under Print Manager Sarah Devlin's stewardship in the magnificent print room. Working alongside alumni of the RDS Drawing Year was an immense privilege. They were a great bunch.

Since the Scottish weather was mostly fine throughout my stay, I spent most of the time that I wasn't in the print room outdoors working en plein air. I'd been out drawing from 7am before the print room opened and had started work with a view of Dumfries House through the trees. My etching experiments would be based upon these early A3 sketchbook drawings.

A3 sketchbook studies for my etching, 'Dumfries House through the trees'

With only 4 days in the print room as part of my residency, the challenge was to make best use of the time on the press. I had taken up some pre-made collagraph blocks (made with cereal packets) to work on between etching processes to see how they'd print at scale. I've been keen to understand the intaglio results from these blocks which I'd also been using to make relief graphite imprints since I hadn't been able to successfully print them at home, without a press. The stark intaglio proofs contrast with the more mysterious graphite imprint relief experiments that were begun in Geraint Evan's Kings Cross core class at the Royal Drawing School last year. I see these experiments as an ongoing inquiry to understand the best print approach to reflect the textural mark making that is often a characteristic of my sketchbook drawings.

Collagraph blocks: graphite imprints and test print details

Wish you were here?

I started creating my Digital Postcards in 2024 whilst touring on honeymoon in South Africa. I’d taken lots of other drawing materials with me to try and keep creative momentum whilst taking time out of my Royal Drawing School ODDY23 course. However, I soon found that the immediacy of picking up my mobile and sketching directly into the Pocket Procreate application with a Meko stylus was easier to accommodate in short amounts of time between tour stops.

Using a mobile to create quick studies was immediate and was much less hassle than carrying around loads of art materials, especially whilst on the move. It meant that I was drawing pretty much every other day, which I somehow simply wouldn’t have done if I were using other media.

The reduced format of the mobile screen and the limited time to make the drawings seem to add to the jeopardy of making them, whilst creating very different (long thinner) compositions or introducing new palettes or mark making, due to being in a different space. Recent drawings made on the beach in Kefalonia proved that as an artist I could go pretty much unnoticed in a public space since everybody else was staring into their mobiles too.

Providing a little commentary to help describe the trips was a fun way to share them on Instagram. Thus began the habit of sending digital postcards home.

Postcard series | Madeira | Mexico ‎ | Kefalonia ‎| Andalusia ‎| Miami ‎| South Africa

More about digital drawing | 1 | 2 ‎ |

Karen and other residency artists working with Print Manager, Sarah Devlin in the print room at Dumfries House.