Lunenburg woman Etch A Sketches iconic N.S. landmarks

When Megs Murray posted photos of her Etch A Sketch drawings of Peggys Cove and the Lunenburg waterfront to Facebook in June, she said some people thought it was Photoshopped.

"And I'm like, 'Wow! Thank you for the compliment, that's so nice because you know what? It's real,'" the Lunenburg, N.S., woman told CBC's Maritime Noon on Wednesday.

Murray said she picked up an Etch A Sketch, a mechanical drawing toy with knobs that first emerged in the 1960s, for the first time in 20 years this past Thanksgiving.

She said she received one as a gag Christmas gift from her mother last year — and that's when she began turning the knobs and recreating iconic Nova Scotia landmarks.

The first post to Facebook was the Peggys Cove sketch. She said the post had nearly 2,000 likes after only being posted for 12 hours.

"I still think it's really funny that I can do these little [sketches] from this toy that was just a joke gift and then now I'm getting that sort of response ... I'm still kind of in shock," she said.

There's quite a bit of detail in the sketches — from shadows on the lighthouse and clouds in the sky in the Peggys Cove image, to the trees and windows and sailboat in her Lunenburg waterfront creation.

"It's interesting, the more detail you put in, the more mistakes you can make," Murray said. "Obviously, there's always a point where once you make a mistake, that's that — you can't erase a section of it or anything."

"But once you start making the lines a bit thicker and adding in more swirls and stuff ... you can go back and cover it up and maybe even make it into something it wasn't originally meant to be."

The sketch of Peggys Cove took two hours, while the sketch of the Lunenburg waterfront took three hours, Murray said.

Murray takes photos of her sketches and then she shakes her Etch A Sketch to get rid of the drawing. She said erasing the work is surprisingly painless.

'Stuff is just stuff'

"Because I can take a picture of it, I'm not too concerned with it. That's something my mom always taught me, stuff is just stuff," she said.

At the time of the interview, Murray said she hadn't erased the Lunenburg waterfront sketch "just because there was so much interest in it," but she added she's "getting really antsy to shake it."

Murray said she would next like to sketch Mahone Bay's Three Churches.