A lot of my pages for the course so far have been quite sombre because I’ve been working with inspiration from objects made of wood and metal. I’m feeling like I want more colour in my life – maybe it’s the February blues! With thoughts of spring and the burgeoning natural world I’ve revisited the photographs I took throughout 2019 of the moths in our garden.

I started by gluing a glossy photo of a Small Magpie Moth on the left hand page. There was a lot of distracting detail around him so I painted that out with white gesso before washing dilute turquoise and purple paint over both pages. I purposely apply the gesso with a bristle brush so it leaves lots of marks on the page – these hold the paint in an interesting way that I think contrasts well with the fluid wash of colour on the opposite page.

You’ll notice that I’ve cut out a moth shape from the right hand page – the black you can see through the hole is simply a scrap of paper placed there to protect the next page from escaping colour!

Once the paint was dry I’ve taken a strip of one of my painted paper bags and glued it to the following page so it is visible through the cut out moth.. At the same time I’ve used a stencil to draw a moth shape onto the reverse of a different paper bag, cut it out and positioned it below the aperture.

I’m quite liking the colours of this page now and because I took a little of the turquoise across the Magpie he blends in quite nicely. Quite a few of our moths have iridescent patterns on their wings so the metallic pastel I’ve used on the crumpled paper bags is perfect to suggest small scale pattern.

I thought a decorative frame might be a nice touch so I’ve cut tiny squares from a third painted bag and glued them to create a partial border. There might be further additions yet because  that blank area on the left that is crying out for some tiny hand written text – I’m thinking on it!!

Hope you’re having fun with Module 2!

Bye for now,
Linda