A couple of weeks have slipped by without me posting – they flashed pass so quickly its unreal (I don’t know how some weeks can disappear in the blink of an eye and yet some days can last a lifetime)
This week I wanted to share a new painting. Back in July I posted the finished watercolour painting of ‘A World Turtle’ and thought, why not do a turtle for each season!
As its autumn I wanted the colours of the foliage to reflect the time of year – November here is a bit nippy but the trees are beautiful as they change colour. I’ve even tried to include little piles of leaves that have been swept together – even if they look like bushes!
This week I thought I’d post a new embroidery that I’ve been working on.
Looking back at the Gatekeeper butterfly photographs (that I posted last week!) I decided to embroider one similar to my other needlework butterflies – I’m developing quite a collection of needlework bugs/insects.
As always I started by roughly drawing four wing and body shapes onto calico and then filled them in with the closest coloured threads I had. I like to block colour first using two stands of embroidery floss and then blend using a single strand (on the smallest needle imaginable – its like a hair!)
I’ve got a new butterfly embroidery to share this week. I’m really happy with the Large White photograph (that I posted last week!) I particularly love this type of butterfly – they’re so beautiful but because the caterpillars eat cabbages humans consider them a pest.
So I decided to embroider one similar to my Holly Blue.
This week I thought post something new that I’ve been working on…as you know I love needlework and I embroidered bees before and wanted to experiment to see if I could create a 3-d butterfly.
When I saw the Holly Blue butterfly and was able to take some photographs of it (that I posted last week!) I knew that I wanted to create a piece of art about this insect.
So I decided to embroider one similar to the bee I did last year, but instead of being a flat piece I want to try and make it a little more three dimensional.
You may or may not know that this coming Monday (May 23rd) is World Turtle Day! I love turtles they are magical creatures and won’t be around much longer if we don’t look after them. I suppose that wasn’t helped by sailors eating them – I think Darwin famously struggled to bring them back from the Galapagos to the UK because they kept eating them on the voyage! (I mean they’re beautiful but don’t exactly look appetising do they?!)
Anyhoo, World Turtle Day was created so that people could celebrate turtles (and tortoises) and their sadly disappearing habitats. I remember as a child my neighbour had a tortoise and use to pout it in a shoebox on the winter to hibernate – which as a kid was hilarious because it would wear your shoes if it found them!
So I decided to draw myself a World Turtle.
The World-bearing Turtle myth is actually Chinese mythology and Native American folklore. Of course one of my favourite authors (one Sir Terry Pratchett) imagined the Discworld which is carried on the back of a giant space turtle, the Great A’tuin. And of course we did (historically speaking) believe the earth was flat at one point in time.
I hope you’ve had a good week so far! This weeks post a few pieces of art about about one of my all time favourite book characters – the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland! And I thought maybe it might be fun to post some pages from my sketchbook.
And while the original Sir John Tenniel illustrations are in black and white in the book the Caterpillar is described as being blue (and precisely 3 inches tall) so I thought that tall my caterpillar related art should use blue tones. Theres a couple of cute drawings, some hand lettering art of “How Doth the Little Crocodile” and a brilliant Terry Pratchett quote!
So, enjoy some blue toned caterpillar/mushroom related art…I hope you like it.
This caterpillar is based more from the 2010 film directed by Tim Burton, I think the movie Absalom (although in the books he doesn’t have a name and is just referred to as the Caterpillar) is much more chilled out than the 1951 Disney version – who in my opinion was far too much of a diva and he yells at Alice far too often ! It’s drawn with crayons which are far harder to control than I remember them being as a kid!
“How Doth the Little Crocodile” is a poem by Lewis Carroll which appears in his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice recites it while attempting to recall “Against Idleness and Mischief” by Isaac Watts. It’s such a brilliant little poem and has always been one that stuck in my head.
To relax, get my brain into the right space and bee a little bit more zen I’ve sat quietly and embroidered myself a little bumble bee. Its all sewn free hand using a single strand of coloured floss at a time onto a natural (and excitingly eco friendly, recycled calico!) It’s been so lovely to study the photos of bees from the garden…as we have at least five types of bee I might sew one for each.
The hoop its in is six inches across and sewn in tiny stitches, I love the fact that the wings look realistic by sewing the threads in different directions.
I absolutely love embroidery, its so soothing and you really feel that you’ve achieved something when a project is finally finished.
ArtyMissK 
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