Bird life

I'm lucky that I live close enough to be able to walk to work. Some mornings when I'm running late I take a short cut across a tiny suburban park. It's just a patch of green with a playground, surrounded by houses. In the last few weeks the magpie geese have arrived, as I cross the park they take off in an eruption of honking and flapping wings.

I've had a look online, and I don't think they're migratory, I think it's more that by the end of the dry season there's not much left that's green out bush, so they come into town to the watered parks and playing fields.

Down near the beach the nuts are out on the casuarina trees, and the black cockatoos are enjoying them - very noisily and messily - squabbling over each branch and dropping a carpet of nuts and twigs to the ground.

It's hardly surprising that birds keep turning up in my artwork, here's a recent painting I did of a curlew.

Lovely to see some bird photos on Cathy Cullis's blog last week - which partly inspired this post!

Hope you're having a great weekend, we've had some decent rain in the last few days - at last!!- so I'm feeling a bit saner!

Crazy weekend

I've survived a crazy weekend, lots of choir rehearsals last week and a lovely performance on Saturday night (Darwin Chorale at the CDU theatre) followed by a craft fair at the waterfront yesterday. That was the really crazy bit, it's the build up here, temperatures up around 35 degrees centigrade, humid but no sign of rain - the craft fair became something of an endurance test. I'm amazed and grateful that so many people risked heatstroke to come out and buy their Christmas presents!! It's lovely to have the ambiance of an outdoor event by the sea, but sometimes I think an airconditioned venue would make more sense. I was so hot and grumpy I didn't even go for a stroll around the other stalls...

The last couple of months have been busy, not only with choir and craft fair preparations but with a commission - a lady who bought some of my prints many years ago and then moved away from Darwin, tracked me down online and requested some ginger cat paintings. Luckily this is a subject I was happy to tackle as I have a ginger cat who turns up in my paintings now and again! Here are the three paintings which I sent down south a couple of weeks ago.

Today I've got the day off work to catch up on exciting things like cleaning the bathroom!! and baking cookies and apple crumble for my neglected family!

Hope you had a great weekend, and hope we get some rain soon :)

new lino print cards

Last time I showed you some gouaches I'd done, and here is a lino print that developed from one of those gouaches. It's a two plate print, which I haven't done before, tho I've done lots of reduction prints.

Here they are on printing day looking a bit patchy. When I'm doing a 'serious' print to go under glass, I use proper printing ink and a beautiful holbein roller - not too hard not too soft! But when I'm making prints for cards or collage I use acrylic paint and a foam roller, and treat it more like a stamp. The results are not as clean and dense - but it doesn't matter because I work back into them with coloured pencils and paint, or cut them up and collage them. I think the fact that they're not 'perfect' makes it easier to be playful with them.

Here's a finished card, I'll have some of these at the Saltwater Craft Fair at the waterfront on  23rd Nov!! and hope to add one to my etsy shop this week...

I hope your November is going well, it's the hot and steamy build up here, also luscious mango season, and looking forward to the pineapples ripening in our front yard.