Digging up some old cards

Every now and then I feel inspired to do an original design card. I was sorting through some old computer files recently and came across two examples I thought I would share. The first was a card I made for Morgan to hand out to his friends at nursery. It was inspired by a play the children put on and included a very eclectic array of characters. The children loved it because they could recognise the characters.

The second is a watercolour I did of my Azure Kingfisher photograph that I sent to my Grandmother. She loved it (as grandmother's do) and last I saw, it had a place of honour in her living room.

Just a little crabby....

This is a female fiddler crab I sketched out and coloured in with watercolour while my son Morgan was painting.

IF - Stripes

A quick sketch for Illustration Friday this week. Topic is 'Stripes', so what better than an animal with a naturally striped boa, ready to accent any mood! I love ring-tailed lemurs...who doesn't?

I can't believe I haven't done any artwork since July!

I realized recently how important it is to keep being creative. You see, I realized long ago how important it is for my sanity to exercise my body. I run. On days when I don't run I'm less patient, less productive and more likely to be grumpy.

So why shouldn't exercising my brain be just as important?

I write. It's my profession. So, after several months of doing less creative writing and more paid writing, I realized I was suffering from a lack of exercise of the brain. I was grumpy, doubting my career choice, unproductive...you name it! So, a couple of days of drawing, photography and doing some unpaid but deeply satisfying creative writing, I feel like I've just done a half marathon and I'm ready to get back at it.

Lesson learned - keep running, keep creating.

Giant Australian Cuttlefish

Just finished this painting today. It was inspired by a cover photo on an old Australian Geographic, which just screamed out WATERCOLOUR!

The giant Australian cuttlefish (Sepia apama) is a master of disguise. The skin of cuttlefish is made up of  layers of different cell types - chromatophores, iridophores, and leucophores - that give it an infinite array of colours. Chromatophores are literally little balls of colour that are so tightly bound up that they are invisible. However, when the muscles attached to the pigment cell is flexed, it stretches the ball out into a disc of colour. The muscles are wired directly to the brain so that pigment changes are instantaneous as information is perceived by the eyes and transmitted to the brain.

Iridophores lie beneath the chromatophores and contain multiple tiny platelets that reflect light, producing the iridescent and metallic colours. Beneath the iridophores are leucophores, which reflect the predominant light in the environment (i.e., they appear white in white light, blue in blue light etc.).  Besides the very impressive colour displays, cuttlefish are able to add another dimension to their camouflage, by creating protrusions in their skin with papillae, they can also mimic textures as well as colours.

Monarch

This is my latest endeavour. I was looking through an art book and came across a beautiful butterfly on canvas. It was incredibly life-like, with the veins of the wings raised and even slight imperfections at the edges. Of course, when I read the text I soon realized that it was, in fact, life...glued to the canvas. So, I was inspired to give it a go but without using a real butterfly. I used texture paste to lift the butterfly off the canvas and literally squeezed it out of a bag like icing to create the veins in the wing. This photo sadly doesn't capture this third dimension, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Azure kingfisher

We saw at least four breeding pairs of azure kingfisher along the Noosa River. It was low light conditions, I had a frustrated two year old hanging off my arm and we were in a canoe. Not ideal conditions and the picture is a little soft as a result. However, it does illustrate the incredible colour of these little beauties.

Cardinalfish

Just finished this piece last night and I'm really happy with it. These are Banggai Cardinalfish (Pterapogon kauderni), a small tropical fish found in Indonesia. They are very popular in the aquarium industry. So much so, that they are now a threatened species. They can be bred in captivity, so if you are purchasing, be sure to ask whether they have been sourced from the wild or bred in captivity. There is no need for them to be harvested from the wild.

Red-legged booby

A red-legged booby chick at East Diamond Islet, remote in the Coral Sea.

Learning to Fly

I had been painting for a number of months and completed several different pieces all with brightly coloured flowers as my subject. I heard about a course that a friend, Celeste Varley, was offering on Pender Island, entitled "Learning to Fly". So, having no training in art whatsoever, I thought this might be fun. I entered into the course thinking I might pick up some advice on techniques, but I came away with so much more. Celeste empowered each of us in the class to tap into creativity within. We did a number of exercises that often challenged me, but ultimately broke me out of patterns I was developing. This piece, now titled "Learning to Fly", is the result of a splash of ochre during an exercise in the second class I took with Celeste. "What do you see?" Celeste asked me of my ochre blob on the canvas. I tried to deny it, but all I could see was the skeleton of a bird. Compared to my bright, colourful flowers, this subject was quite frankly a bit morbid and I just wasn't willing to see it. However, with Celeste's encouragement, the canvas and I worked together to create this piece. It has now become one of my favourites as I no longer see the morbidity, but the beauty. It was a turning point for me in my work.

If you would like to find out more about Celeste Varley's courses, please visit her at http://heartsongstudio.com/. Who knows what you might discover?

In Focus

I recently completed this lioness. It was a fairly pivotal piece as it was different from anything I had painted to date. I hadn't attempted to capture an animal on canvas before, scared of my subject not having life. The title has two meanings: 1) the subject most certainly has the target "in focus" and 2) it was painted at a time in my life where I felt things were coming into focus for me personally.