GETTING STARTED

I spent a great morning last Tuesday being shown behind the scenes at the Oxford Natural History Museum. Getting up close and personal to the collections of British moths and beetles. So as you can imagine I have a vast amount of resource material to work from now.
Consequently I have a number of sketch book pages underway. I have posted

a few in various states. Non of them are anywhere near complete, but it gives you some idea of how I build up these drawings.

A quick list of techniques used here, gum arabic transfer, photo copy/magazine and acrylic transfer, white acrylic paint drawing, indian ink washes, bleached Quink ink, label collage and a sneaky bit of pencil drawing.

ENAMEL EXPERIMENTS

I am adding 3D moths to the enamel labels I am making.
It is still all a bit hit and miss, but I am enjoying the challenge.

I particularly like the effect of this stamped and sifted red.

MOODY MOTHS

If in doubt hit the sketch book, I have been trying to find a way to include the moths into my

beetle work. I want to create a homage to the museum collections of insects, particularly the Hope Entomology Collection in the Natural History Museum, Oxford which I am going to take a closer look at later this month.

In the meantime the magazine, Cloth.Paper.Scissors has included the moth collagraph house in their readers challenge 'home sweet home' in the Nov/Dec issue. I called it a light house!! Get it?

STILL PLAYING

This set of teaspoons will be at Nature in Art, Gloucestershire in their Contemporary Craft Exhibition. www.nature-in-art.org.uk And this spoon and fork set will be at the Twenty Twenty Gallery, Much Wenlock for their Christmas show. www.twenty-twenty.co.uk

In the mean time I am still working in my sketch book.