The Last Photos from Warburton.

 Some one got serious about keeping the wallabies, kangaroos and cockatoos out of their vegetable garden, but then forgot to grow any vegetables!

 I spotted this whimsical house while out walking one day.  I just love the copper hood over the window and the flower pattern in the wall is most unusual.

The front door of the same house is highly decorated too, and the huge Blue Wren on it's stand is a dominant feature on the way up to the entrance.

More from Warburton.

 A very interesting plaque set into the ground in front of a private home, with no  sign of a Pine tree, from Aleppo or anywhere else!

                                                Is this a shelter for an amazing BBQ area?

                     A very good looking Kookaburra, but a not so good photograph unfortunately.

A Few Days in the Mountains.

 I've just spent a few days away in Warburton at a country retreat that we return to every year, or at least we have for the past 4 years. This below is the scene at the back of the house, a steep pathway with the mountains beyond.

 At the front of the house is the winding road that is lovely to walk along in the early morning, but so far we haven't seen one wombat, even though motorists are warned to keep an eye out for them.

Some of the group hard at work on their various projects in front of the lovely log fire off to the left of the photo.

New Stamps.

Continuing with my theme of beetles, I've just added 2 new ones to the collection, a Long Horned Beetle on the left and a weevil on the right of the paper. Unfortunately the position of the legs of the Long Horned beetle makes it look as if it's dead!

Grey Melbourne.

   On a grey winter's day this is the view of the distant city of Melbourne from our local park.

In the city this time, crossing the river Yarra with the city buildings on the right and the Southbank restaurant strip on the left and further round out of sight the arts precinct with the galleries, theatres and music venues.

Inside our wonderful Recital Centre with it's warm honey coloured wood walls and ceiling, all carved to promote the best acoustics from anywhere in the entire theatre.

 It's still grey and overcast at the docks end of the Yarra River, here looking towards the bridge from which the second photo was taken.

A Bit of a Failure.

 

Yesterday I made a few attempts to print from the Tetra Pak collagraph plate that I  made a little while ago. Only one was worth writing about and it unfortunately I had the sand sprinkled on far too thickly, so that the lower half of this plate was a mess. However, I quite liked the top half, seeing a couple of birds and the tree tops buffeted by wind.

 

The inverse in Photoshop is interesting, but only vaguely! In cleaning the plate after this session, some of the sand was scrubbed off, so it might be worth having another try at printing with it. Or I could just start again and cut out more motifs from the old embossed wallpaper that I bought at a street market.

Stencil and Collograph.

 Somewhere I saw a video or read a blog about using a stencil and moulding paste to make a collagraph plate.  I recently bought a small stencil of a rocky wall and decided to try the technique. I also decided to use some textured paper for the sky area, but as soon as I glued it in place I could see that it was wrong!

  Here I'm using just part of the stencil, having first cut the solid edges to make them a bit thinner.

 Well the wall worked nicely, so I added some sawdust to the foreground, but the textured paper was even more wrong now.

I managed to get most of it off, so I went ahead and glued some pressed lichen  below the wall.

While applying glue to stick down some more vegetation, I found that it lifted the remains of the paper! Now to seal it all and try printing in a few days time.

The Moon.

 In the early hours of this morning here there was an eclipse of the moon, added to which it was a so called 'Blood Moon'. Unfortunately by the time I went out to photograph it, the moon was obscured by trees and I missed out this time. The photo above was taken during a previous eclipse, when the moon was in a far better part of the sky to take  photos.

                     Not an eclipse this time, but a dramatic full moon with scudding clouds.

             Another photo of a full moon taken from on board a ship somewhere in the Baltic Sea.