Hello my friends and happy Friday! 

You may or may not know that this coming Monday (May 23rd) is World Turtle Day! I love turtles they are magical creatures and won’t be around much longer if we don’t look after them. I suppose that wasn’t helped by sailors eating them – I think Darwin famously struggled to bring them back from the Galapagos to the UK because they kept eating them on the voyage! (I mean they’re beautiful but don’t exactly look appetising do they?!)

Anyhoo, World Turtle Day was created so that people could celebrate turtles (and tortoises) and their sadly disappearing habitats. I remember as a child my neighbour had a tortoise and use to pout it in a shoebox on the winter to hibernate – which as a kid was hilarious because it would wear your shoes if it found them!

So I decided to draw myself a World Turtle.

The World-bearing Turtle myth is actually Chinese mythology and Native American folklore. Of course one of my favourite authors (one Sir Terry Pratchett) imagined the Discworld which is carried on the back of a giant space turtle, the Great A’tuin. And of course we did (historically speaking) believe the earth was flat at one point in time.

Floating ever onwards through space, the occupants of its castle gaze happily at the universe and other distant stars.

So he’s drawn with a 0.1 and 0.3 fine line black ink pen, I’m really quite pleased with it and may even (eventually) colour it in! I drew my ideal fairy tale castle because if you’re going to live on the back of a turtle floating through space you might as well live in a castle.

Theres a really clever trick with drawing (and painting) of layering your image so it doesn’t seem flat – literally putting trees in front of and behind the castle make it more ‘in the middle’ and drawing the far side flippers of the turtle gives him depth.

That was something I really got to grips with during lockdown as BBC4 showed ‘Painting with Bob Ross’ who is in my opinion one of the greatest people who ever lived and it was an amazing thing to sit and just listen to the soothing tones of the man! But I did actually (and unsuccessfully) have a go at oil painting – which really isn’t my thing, watercolours are much easier to use!!

Yeah, so that’s it for this week…What do you think? I hope you enjoyed this weeks post, it was a lot of fun to come up with. Do you have any suggestions on colours for the turtle or think things can be improved? Thanks so much for checking out this art post and as always I wish you a wonderful week!

ps. Happy World Turtle Day!!

© ArtyMissK 2022