"It will be fun when we at last meet"

A wood elf

Another tiny picture - this time using pencil with watercolour. My mission to learn to draw people properly is going to start with a whole lot of not-quite human people. For one thing, I adore fantasy and science fiction, and for another, it provides a marvellous excuse for any anatomical errors. People's waists aren't that tiny! Why is her arm, like, the widest part of her? And her eyes are totally wrong! Aha, but she's an elf - she's meant to look like that! Well, that's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

Prickly pears

Lately I've been working on a number of really tiny pictures. I feel freer to experiment that way, because it silences that little voice in my head that starts freaking out any time I waste good paper on messing about. This isn't good paper, just scraps, so I can use it for any strange idea that comes my way. At the moment I'm experimenting with mixed media - ink and watercolour, pencil and watercolour, ink and whatever else I can get to stick to the paper. Outlines everywhere; I'm trying to find almost a comic-book style of doing things. First this one. It's safe, it's a plant.



I used watercolours, insoluble ink and salt on Schoeller's Hammer paper (which is the smoothest anti-bleed surface out there, but which is sadly being discontinued). The size is pretty much what you see on the screen. The wonderfully vulgar yellowish colour of some of the leaves is Green Gold, the last colour I bought and my latest obsession.

Sun halo!

So I wanted rain - and I got it, and more! Yesterday evening there was a semi-decent storm that had me running around outside trying to take pictures of lightning. That didn't work but I got this double rainbow. No, I'm not going to say it!

Then, this morning...

A friend of my husband's called him to tell him to look outside. The radio station that my mother was listening to was getting calls from all sorts of mad people saying that the world was ending and the aliens were coming. It was even on the national TV news this evening. It was a sun halo, and I've never seen one before in my life. Neither, it seems, had anyone else around here. We don't usually get the very high cirrus clouds filled with ice crystals that are needed for this to happen. In this case, it was caused by a storm system over Botswana. Has anyone else out there seen one?

I was trying to protect the camera as if it were my eyes. Only later did I think that I should have just snapped away madly without looking. Hooray for strange weather!