Cyclamen nouveau anyone?

This weeks entry is a bit of departure from my normal stuff...I don't think I pulled it off, but it does look very colourful next to my Stink Bug!

Two more things to add to the list of things I love are 1) art nouveau and 2) plants that are tough! The Canberra winter is not cold by some standards but for us Aussies Canberra is probably the coldest city we have....we even get into sub zero temperatures...Wow!

I love cyclamen, not only because they come in what I think of as very glamorous colours, but they show those colours in the depth of winter which makes me very happy. I bought one from the markets a couple of months ago and it is a champion - I leave for work in the morning and it is all covered in frost and white....and when I return home it is a deep red wine colour and looking spectacular. Grins!

I don't know if art nouveau and cyclamen are a match made in heaven, but I gave it a go anyway. I used acrylic paints straight onto the molskine page....it held up to the paint pretty well. It didn't photograph really well though....the pics that were in good focus also had a lot of flash glare.

I'm looking forward to the sketch crawl (and Canberra Sketchbookers get together) this weekend....expect to see the results in my next post.

Up close and personal

Many moons ago I used to work as a pseudo entomologist....I used to spend hours collecting, sorting, identifying and photographying the little critters....and as you can imagine I spent most of my work hours staring down a microscope. One of my favourite tasks was to pick and identify bugs from out of pitfall traps. No I don't think I'm mad! Let me explain. Sometimes leaves and seeds and flower buds would also have fallen into the jam jar sized traps and when I looked down the scope my whole vision was taken up with this beautiful miniature world suddenly larger than life. It was most amazing, and often incredibly beautiful, to see in absolute detail things that I would never normally notice.

I have since moved onto other work but I still have a bit of a fascination with bugs. I have also always appreciated the incredible skill of biological illustrators....so my second sketch is a bit of a homage to both. The bug in the picture, and I mean a hemiptera (sucking insect) not just generic creepy crawly, is a Stink Bug. I was tempted to put on a scale bar, but since I've taken too much artistic licence in the drawing, I resisted. In real life it would be about 8mm long....very small eh.



I based the drawing on a photo I took with a microscope and digital camera. The drawing I finished using a felt-tipped pen.

A flower in the forest

My sketchbook arrived yesterday and I was so excited I sat down and started my first sketch without taking my coat off.

My friend Morgan takes the most beautiful photos, I love them all! I think Morgan and I view the world in much the same way, for one thing we both love hunting for treasure out there in wild and we both love macro photography, particularly of the treasures we find. So, I thought I'd start my sketchbook with an interpretation of one of her recent photos.

This is the picture half done...

And here is the final product.....

I hope you like it Morgan!