Dear Sarah/Dear Nikki

Our 2025 Drawing a Day Project

(These letters chronicle our full year of daily drawings and accompanying correspondence/conversation. Learn more about Sarah Harvey here. More info about me can be found here.)

Message 1: Nikki to Sarah

Hello Sarah! I can’t tell you how excited I am to be embarking on this year-long challenge with you. The plan (I should know better by now than to make plans…) is to each do a drawing a day - and send it to the other person in an email. Said drawing will be accompanied by a note of some sort - could relate to the drawing, to a previous email, to world news, the storm that has obscured my mountains or kept you huddled inside until the west coast winds die down.

January 1, 2025 is our chosen day to begin - arbitrary, but hey - we need to start somewhere, right?

My dad - Colin - on the Camino of 2017. I grabbed this early drawing to a) test how hard/easy it would be for me to attach something to an email and b) because my strange late-life desire to start drawing is at least in part his fault.

Other than the daily drawing and caption (which can be the backbone/jumping off place for our messages back and forth), here's a list of things we could take note of when we are a) very tight for time or b) can't think of anything to write or draw.

1. Weather report. There’s always weather.

2. what are you reading?

3. what did you last eat?

4. overheard on the street/at a coffee shop/on a plane - wherever - let's just call that one 'overheard'

5. comment on our book project - could be good for days when we are actually back at work on the novel

Any other thoughts?

Dear Nikki, January 1, 2025

Dear Nikki,

Happy New Year! Here's to a year of co-creation--on our thriller and now on our "a drawing a day" adventure. I did this drawing a few years ago, before Covid. It's a small black leather purse that used to belong to my long-since-deceased mother. I remember it being her "going out" purse. Like her, it is small and elegant. There is a neatly folded Kleenex in the inside pocket. I haven't touched it. Ever.

My mother was an ardent sketcher--never without a small sketchbook and a pencil handy. She had no formal training as an artist, at least not until she got her BFA in Visual Arts in her sixties. She did some large, abstract oil paintings during her time as an art student, but her real loves were always sketching and watercolour. I have always wanted to draw, to carry a wee sketchbook with me, along with a few pencils. I have flirted with acrylic painting but I like the idea of being able to make art anywhere.

I am starting a drawing class this month, with a local artist named Natalie Shumka (natalieshumka.ca). And I'm going to do weekly drawing sessions with a six-year-old--my granddaughter, Kianna, who draws constantly and has way more pencils than I have. Between you, Natalie and Kianna I hope to develop a lifelong habit (and love) of drawing.

Let the collaboration begin!