Something smooth, decay, something light and a collection

Week 4 of my Summer Nature Scavenger Hunt art challenge

After a very busy weekend with a stall at one of my biggest summer markets it has been a real joy to slow down with my Scavenger Hunt prompts over the last few days. This week I’ve tackled something smooth, decay, something light and a collection, and experimented with sunlight printing, line and wash, gouache and photography.

Something smooth - line and wash driftwood

I love finding pieces of driftwood on the beach - there’s something so calming about their bleached colours and smooth textures - so it wasn’t a difficult decision to use a small piece of driftwood to answer the prompt of ‘something smooth’!

I’ve been missing my pen and watercolours, so I decided to do a simple line-and-wash study. I first drew in the outline and main features of my piece of driftwood using a 0.05mm fineline pen and then added some colour with washes of Winsor & Newton watercolours in Yellow Ochre, Brown Ochre and Payne’s Gray.

Decay - gouache fungi

Fungi are one of my all-time favourite plants to find when out and about - I love that they mysteriously appear (and disappear) seemingly overnight. And I also rather enjoy drawing them - this is a tea towel design I created to celebrate edible mushroom foraging, featuring nine varieties of edible mushroom found in the British Isles.

For the prompt of ‘decay’ I’ve therefore chosen to illustrate a Deer Shield or Deer Mushroom, which is found on dead wood, stumps, logs and also wood chippings. It is a saprobe - meaning that it gets nutrition from the dead wood - part of the magical interconnectedness of all things. (It apparently is edible, but not recommended for eating and some people can have a reaction to it - so just don’t!)

I’ve actually never used gouache before but I had a small set of tubes from an art subscription box so I cracked them open and had a go, trying to remember to work dark-to-light (rather than light-to-dark, as with watercolours!)

Something light - a sunography print

I’m pretty pleased with my response to this prompt as not only is the subject light in weight, I used ‘light’ to create the print!

I found this little pack of sunography paper in the shop at one of our local English Heritage properties at the beginning of the summer holidays (but you can easily pick some up online). Sunography - or cyanotype - paper is infused with light-sensitive chemicals to create unique prints when exposed to sunlight. The chemicals react to the ultraviolet light, changing the colour of the paper. If you block parts of the paper off by arranging items on top of it, this stops the exposure behind the item, creating a relief print.

I experimented with a couple of different types of grass seed, but this perennial rye grass did best at blocking the light to create my print. As it is always windy here in the North East, I found a piece of clear acetate and placed it over my grass seed and sun paper, weighed down with some stones around the edges to stop everything from blowing away whilst the chemicals did their thing!

A collection - photography

Photography totally feels like cheating to me, but then in order to fit a collection on to a 4cm x 4cm square, it was either going to rely on tiny drawings, or taking a photograph and then editing it to the correct size, so here we are!

This is my collection of mussel shells - when I started picking them up (all from the same beach) I had some half-formed idea that I was going to set them into plaster as a door wreath, but I haven’t really got enough (although I’ve too many to store easily!) I suppose I’ll just have to go back for some more!

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You can find out more about my Summer Nature Scavenger Hunt Art Challenge (and download your own grid) in this post: