Beetles from the Past.

I've been carving beetle stamps for quite a while now, as evidenced by these two textile pieces worked some 5 years ago. I carved the stamps, printed them out, scanned them into the computer and worked up the image from there.

The gum leaves too were stamped out in the same way. I don't think that I will ever run out of interesting beetle shapes to carve and use thank goodness!

Koalas Climbing.

         Looking back through the stamps that I've carved so far this year for the 12 Aussie Days of Christmas project, I came across the koala stamp and realised that I hadn't shared either it or the finished page with the Blog world. The tree is a magnificent Eucalypt that has been standing in a paddock for decades, and I have photographed it many times over the 20 years that I have known it. I have pictures of it in fog, in drought dry grass (as above) and all sorts of weather conditions in between. I haven't actually seen a koala in this particular tree, but I have seen one or more in adjacent trees over the years. I finished this image, printed it and added it to the others, but when I went back to scan it for this post, I found that I had actually included 8 koalas climbing. One had to go, and it did! Click on the image for a closer look at the 7 koalas.

6 Brolgas Dancing.

 Here are the 2 carved Brolga stamps together. They both have minor faults, but given that they both have to be very much reduced in size, the miss-carvings just won't be noticed.

 And here we have the three pairs of Brolgas dancing in the bush together. Again I have used one of my own photographs as the background, something that I have done with all the various birds and animals in the series.

First Brolga.

As the next month in the Australian Christmas Series features 6 Brolgas Dancing, I've started to carve the first of the 2 stamps that I want to use. Once again I will make the background from one of my own photos, but this time it  won't show the actual area that you might find a Brolga frequenting. They do have a wide habitat range across the country, but I just haven't taken a suitable photo, so I'll 'cheat' a little this time. Here I'm trying out the stamp for the first time, and it isn't too bad, just a few things to correct.

Beetle for August.

Here is the final beetle piece for the month of August. I have a few busy weeks coming up, so it was a case of getting on and making this ahead of time. The colour chosen for September is pink, so that will be an interesting challenge! I also need to get on and make a stamp to use for the other monthly challenge, the Aussie Days of Christmas. The next one is 6 Brolgas dancing, which should be fun.

New Beetle Stamp.

The next beetle will have a yellow background, the colour chosen by the group for the month of August. I have my hand-dyed fabric for all sorts of colours, so I'm sure that I have something yellow. The beetle will probably be black rather than the colours shown above in my test print.

Sold!

My print, Dragon Tide, has recently been displayed in an exhibition at the Southern Highland Print Studio in New South Wales. It was part of a fascinating exchange of prints between their studio and the Firestation Print Studio in Malvern, Melbourne. Someone liked my print enough to buy it, and luckily I have another copy to display at our reciprocal exhibition later in the year.

Stamps.

Here I used one of the paler background prints from yesterday's session. I worked up a little design using an old butterfly stamp that I carved some years ago and a tiny little new one that I made especially for this piece of work. The strips of geometric shapes were also carved yesterday. I think this sort of design has potential, but not on the very dark backgrounds that resulted from the print session.