Spider Webs.

 In this photo you can barely see the St Andrew's Cross spider's web, just the 2 lower zig zag filaments that give the spider it's name. The 2 upper parts of the cross are partially broken.

 This spider seems to have had a 'senior' moment while spinning its web! Most of the structure is beautifully placed, but suddenly she spins a bit of chaos.

               It's hard to believe that a small spider could place her strands of web so evenly.

                                  Another web after a rain shower, pearl drops on the silk.

                                           This one in the bush is just so beautifully made.

Worth the Hike.

 This was the view from the top of Golden Mountain in the Strathbogie Ranges. It was a hike of only about 3 Km, but having already driven 23 Km to get to the start of the track, we were in quite a remote area before we began the ascent.

Although it's all very dry and rugged, the bush is beautiful and the hike to the summit for the view was well worth the effort.

 The granite boulders were spectacular and being dry, the moss wasn't at all slippery as might have been the case in winter.

                                                 The distant farm land and hills beyond.

Hot Birds!

As is usual for an Australian summer, it's very hot and dry, so we keep the bird baths filled and enjoyed seeing this band of  Thornbills all bathing together this evening.

Natural Sculpture.

 While walking in the bush this weekend my eye was drawn to these weathered old logs, which I dubbed natural sculpture.

Alien Planets 2.

 Another circular printing plate with lots of texture. This started out as a discarded chip packet, which I ironed under baking paper and trimmed to fit a circular piece of mat board.

The texture is a little too deep to really get the ink into all the crevasses, but the lighter areas do contrast nicely with the darker areas. I had a sort of red planet (Mars) in mind, but I ended up with either a too pink or a too orange colour, never mind, they're my planets and I can colour them however I want!

Hail !

 Whilst we do sometimes get hail here in Melbourne, I've never experienced a hail storm like the one that sent these stones crashing down. It was a very localised storm, as as we were away from home  for the afternoon celebrating a friend's 80th birthday, we missed the storm itself, thank goodness, it must have been terrifying! These are big hands by the way !

 We arrived back home some hour or so after the storm had passed to find the garden under a layer of huge hailstones. As it wasn't a particularly cool day, they had started to melt by then, but some were so big that they stayed for quite some time.

 With stones that big there was a bit of damage of course, like several panes of broken glass in our small greenhouse and holes in some parts of the house roof.

Unfortunately I didn't put anything into this picture to give an idea of the scale, but some of the hailstones were golf ball sized.

Another Page.

                                  More of the same, rejected prints, stamps, and quotations.

Pages 2 & 3.

On the left is sunprint made with a transparency of grasses as well as one made with various butterfly images that I have cut out. A few leaf prints, a couple of beetle stamps and a hand carved stamp of the word butterfly and a pseudo alphabet finish off this page.
On the right I have included some quotes about beetles that I found and printed onto paper that I coloured with paint, but I don't think that much of this page has changed since I last posted the image.

The Beetle Book.

Whenever I have a bit of time to spend, I keep going on my beetle book. All the stamps, and background prints are my own work and most of the lettering is hand carved too. I'm trying to make use of the many discarded prints and experimental left overs that I have stored away.

You've Stolen my Bed!

When puppy sitting yesterday we had to laugh when our 11 year old dog Polly decided that the puppy's bed was so much better than hers and that little Molly could just keep out............ poor Molly!

Mars?

As usual I couldn't resist using my favorite (easy) Photoshop filter, Invert. This is the print that I did yesterday in blue and of course the inversion is orange, hence the red planet above. I might even try printing it with orange ink on black paper sometime, I love the effect!

A Day of Printing.

Unbelievably, after days of heat and fires in the country, today has been really cool with a light rain falling for most of the day. I took advantage of some indoor time to get out my little printing press out and run a few trials of recently made collagraph plates. The moon above definitely needs some craters or other texture to show on it's surface.

                           This is working out quite well, with darks and lights for contrast.

    The same plate printed in black ink with a little bit of blue showing from the previous print.

I can see ways of improving each of the prints.

Second Thoughts.

 I decided that I really didn't like the silver dragonfly printed over the top of the blue butterfly in the lower left area, so I hunted the web for quotes that mentioned beetles.I printed out the quotes in  deep turquoise blue and painted over them in a lighter shade of the same colour and pasted them in the position the picture above shows. Click on the image to enlarge and you may be able to read the quotes.

I then began the next page, using an old sunprint of grasses made to look like trees. I placed my large carved pseudo lettering stamp to the right of that and added a couple of beetle stamps and a few leaf prints. The sunprint still looks as bit empty even though I stamped a few tiny butterflies, so I'm not sure what will come next.

Mistake or Creative Flair?

The colour hasn't come out quite right in the photo of this print that I have used for the cover of my beetle book.  It was made as a sun print some years ago, and is much more brown than the burgundy/purple that it looks to be here. I was in too much of a hurry and didn't measure out the space for the word beetle on the right hand side and as a result it doesn't fit in one line.  Is that a horrible mistake or some sort of creative flair or license I wonder? The large black beetles are stamped on after I glued the print to the cover. As usual, the stamp is one that I carved a while ago.

First for the New Year.

If you're anything like me you have all sorts of bits and pieces left over from art work, or things that didn't work out well enough to use. I have a pile of collagraph prints that didn't make the grade, but that I couldn't bring myself to throw away either. I bought a cheap spiral back book of brown paper and decided to have fun over the holiday season by trying to use up as many of the left over prints and ones that didn't make the grade as possible. The pages in the book are about 30 cm square and quite thin, so the first thing that I did was to glue two of the pages together. I then grabbed 2 failed collagraphs and stuck them in, the circular web type one nicely echoed the curve in the tree trunk when glued over it. I had the foliage, beetle, butterfly and dragonfly stamps already carved from some time ago, but I carved  3 tiny word stamps this afternoon, blue, beetle and butterfly. I feel that the leafy part of the tree is a bit boring, and needs some attention, which I'll think about, but that's two prints used.................many more to go!