Making a New Collograph Plate.

 Whilst the previous plate worked reasonably well, I felt that I needed to make another one with more varied vegetation and more fine textures. Using the same basic idea of water, rocks and plants I started off with pieces of thin bark of various types.

                      Then I used pressed weed seed heads, lichen, sawdust and a little sand.

               With all the edges trimmed, it was time to coat the plate in several layers of shellac.

Watercolour Enhancement.

This is one of the copies of a collagraph plate that that I made recently.  There are a few faults, such as the creased paper in various places, but I decided to go ahead and enhance the picture a bit with watercolour anyway. I can see that it has possibilities on this particular print, so I'll try a few more and hopefully get some without the creases, which were probably caused by having the pressure on the press too high.

The Jewel in the Tomb!

 You might remember this tiny little Jewel spider photo that I posted  a few weeks ago, well there is one less of these in the world after this rather amazing looking wasp decided to paralyse one of the spiders and seal it up in her mud chamber for her larva to eat.

                                                Here she is packing the spider into it's tomb.

                           She's off to get another load of wet mud to seal up the entrance.

                                         All sealed up and ready to make another chamber.

 

                                                    Working hard on the second 'tomb'.

                                         What an amazing feat of engineering and precision.

Compensation.

 While it's been just too hot for me to get stuck into serious art work, there have been compensations in the garden, like this gorgeous Flowering Gum tree for one.

      The bees love the blossoms and the sound of their buzzing just fills the air around the tree.

This is just a tiny fraction of the overall mass of colour and blossoms on the tree.  The resulting gumnuts after the flowers have finished blooming need to be removed as much as possible, as their weight can easily snap branches off the tree when they are dry.

Dog in Paradise!

                                                    A hot day, a dog, a stick and a dam.

                                                        What could be better than that?

                                                   Another throw of the stick of course.

Find.

On my morning walk I'm always looking at piles of discarded items on people's nature strips and in hired skips, especially at the books that people throw out. This particular skip contained several in this series of travel books, but I can't actually find a date it was published. Full of black and white photos, fascinating advertisements and interesting maps, 6 of the books came home with me.

 

 The maps are attached at the spine of the books and are fairly fragile, and in some cases torn away almost completely from the book.

           I love this representation of the city view from the Bodleian library, Oxford University.

Carpet of Flowers.

Over the course of 2016 a group of friends and I set out to make a small (A5) piece of textile art each month reflecting a garden that we had visited during the month. Of course our own gardens were a source of images too, but we did try to feature other gardens, private and public. Some people chose to show views of a garden overall, and others decided to feature a flower from a different garden each month, as I did.
Although not everyone has managed to make a new piece each month, the ones finished so far make quite a display. It will be even more colourful when each of the seven people have made all 12 of their garden inspired artworks.

Poem Illustration.

 This is the first test print of the poem illustration using all the various components, however I'm not at all happy with a lot of it. First the Celtic Cross needs to be re- carved, it's too big and the decoration is not right. Don't worry, the angel is supposed not to have hands or arms!

  This I think will be better. All these test prints are done with stamp pad ink and the blacks are therefore very blotchy and pale. The final version will be printed with proper printing ink, then the worry will be that the fine detailed lines will be lost if the ink is applied too heavily!

Yes, definitely better. Now I need to carve some more foliage, no more flowers needed, but just some leaves. Nearly there.