Aussie Swap

I so wish you could see this lizard in real life - he looks so much better and his colouring is far softer and more muted and paler actually. I saw lots of lizards on my trips to Oz - all sorts and all sizes and not all outdoors either. They fascinate me and I think they look like little dinosaurs and such fun when they walk or run away swinging their body this way and that as they go. This is a pen and ink and pencil drawing - then I got a flash of inspiration and added a foreground of dried alchemilla mollis which look the same colour as the water colour background. He really looks like he is hidden behind it.




The inspiration for this tiny fish painting came from some Aboriginal pieces of art I saw - again it is larger than life here.



This is a fluffy little fledgling Kookaburra - another freehand drawing with watercolour pencils - and when wondering what background to do - I just decided to do it in the style of the Aboriginal painters. It took me a couple of hours at least, as I had to keep going over and over and over it to get the right colour on the backing paper.

I used burnt orange card as I wanted to convey the colour of the soil and the heat of Australia.

These pictures are bigger than the ATCs so magnify every detail - some you can't see with the naked eye.


This one did not scan well at all. In reality it is a luminous funky fish - which I drew with souffle pens which give it an embossed effect.

The fish itself is yellow and purple - both bright and shiny. The sea weed is raised too and shiny green, and the blue water colour pencil background is pale not as dark as in the scan.

Because of the luminosity of the paint - it effects the scanner so yellow looks invisible and the green and purple look pale - but I thought I would post it on here anyway to remind me of what I did.