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Just before Christmas I bought a book from an Antiquarian BookSeller at a lovely event down near Penzance at the Tremenheere Sculpture Park.  Well, I say a book  but it’s really a pamphlet.  The little pamphlet is nearly 100 years old, written in 1926 by Mr A A Clinnick, the president of the Truro Old Cornwall Society and is entitled The Cornish Year.

The Cornish Year was a day by day diary of Cornish events and stories for each day of the year, or so I thought!

During the lull of post-Christmas and pre-New Year I had a thought about doing some illustrations on my iPad to fill the time.  So I started at the first day of January in the pamphlet, I was immediately struck by how many Saints were mentioned.  Then I saw an entry about a woman who walked from Newlyn to London to see the Great Exhibition of 1851.  I was curious why she had been placed as a January entry… so I started to do a little more research.  Her birth and death dates were later in the year and the exhibition started in May!  The lovely Mr Clinnick had slotted her into a gap between saints.

I was now hooked on research.  Double checking every entry, it made me realise how fortunate we are having so much information available to us just by a few clicks of a mouse and the great Google God.

I started to realise that some of the saints really had nothing to do with Cornwall and a lot of information mis-dated now left gaps in the calendar.  

And this is when the penny dropped.  I had to do my own Cornish Year, one that was updated with more recent events, traditions and people.   One thing that I was sure of was that the entries had to be varied and across the whole of Cornwall.  A real mixture of interesting stories.  

I had post-its piled up all around me and sheets of paper with information scribbled on them.  The information was everywhere, I’d bookmarked loads of websites and I was starting to see that organisation was required.  Out come the spreadsheets and a clever google calendar.  

From the start I’d decided to post my illustrations on Instagram along with a write up about the person/place/festival.  On procreate I’d already found the joy of creating a palette of colours from a photo so I found one I’d taken in January to base my posts colour palette on.  A limited palette makes you think about how you interpret the images you draw whilst giving them a nice connection to each other.  I was going to keep to one colour palette but someone very clever said I needed to do a colour palette for each month.  Thanks Claire.

I had fun selecting photos of Cornwall from my hundreds of images, they had to be relevant to the month I was using them so the colours change and get brighter with the seasons. 

The other thing I decided on fairly early on was that I would stick to Procreate and to do the images square.  I wrote on the image a title, such as the person’s name, and also the relevant date for the post.  Some things I found that I really wanted to include took some digging to find an identifiable date so sometimes this might be someone’s wedding date or a publication date, or something even more obscure, so long as it is relevant to the post.

I was aiming to do a post a day, however that soon went awry – there was just too many good stories to include.  

At the moment I’ve completed illustrations and scheduled posts right up to mid November and have amassed 750 separate entries.  Oops!

So to find my posts have a look at my Instagram and check out hashtag #thecornishyear, there’s some great stories posted already but some amazing ones to come too.

Sally x