Dream Cottages and Spiders

These days I have been dreaming of islands, so when I came across an image that could be straight out of my dreams (on buzzfeed) I decided to draw it. I filled up my old sketchbook the other day, and my new one has much larger pages. Because I have this compulsive need to fill the page, this probably means my illustrations are about to get more complex. For instance, drawing this single picture took me about the same amount of time as it took for me to draw five naked mole rats in my old sketch book.

This is the ink drawing before I imported it into photoshop to add the colors.  I'm not sure if I've really figured out how to color ink drawing with photoshop yet, especially with these more detailed pictures. The "bucket" tool just doesn't cut it anymore :(.

Drawing this image reminded me of a story from my childhood. When I was growing up, the family of a friend of mine had a cottage on an island near Perth, Ontario, and she was kind enough to invite me there a couple of times. My first visit was particularly memorable because the room we were sleeping in was infested with daddy longleg spiders. We didn't realize this until after we went to bed, which was when they started coming out of the walls. It was pretty terrifying. I remember we called her dad up to the room, and he started kicking the walls like a spider-killing ninja. Alas, there were too many of them, and they continued to pour out of the walls. I think we ended up sleeping downstairs on the floor.

I don't know how accurate my memory of this event actually is, but I do have some evidence that it happened. At the time, I was reading this old copy of a collection of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales (which are awesomely creepy and really fit the situation). My friend and I were sitting on the bed - our spider-free island - monitoring the situation to ensure that none of the spiders climbed aboard. Then, one did! I lifted my book of fairy tales high into the air, and dropped it on the spider. Splat! To this day, that book has a flattened spider affixed to its front cover.