Spiral, get close, open and in the air

Week 3 of my Summer Nature Scavenger Hunt art challenge

I can’t quite believe that we’re half way through August, but I’ve had another enjoyable week of slowing down and creating my 4x4cm squares for my Summer Nature Scavenger Hunt art challenge. This week I’ve tackled the prompts of spiral, get close, open and in the air and I’ve experimented with flower pressing, doodle sketching, coloured pencils and linocut printing.

Spiral - a doodle sketch

We have a lot of Fiddlehead Ferns growing near us and they are the perfect example of the Fibonacci spiral in nature. A Fibonacci spiral is created by drawing an arc through a series of squares which correspond to the Fibonacci number sequence (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 23, 21, 34, 55, etc) - and this corresponds to the way that the Fiddlehead Fern spiral is shaped - mysterious, eh?!

I opted for a simple doodle sketch of a fern head spiral for this prompt, as I was a bit short of time this week. That said, I think that you still get the sense of the plant and its form from fewer marks.

Get Close - a coloured pencil study

I was actually going to use this plant for my ‘between the cracks’ prompt as Ivy-Leaved Toad Flax can usually be found growing in cracks in a wall or pavement. However, as I looked closely at the individual flowers I noticed more and more details and I decided that this would be the ideal subject for the ‘get close’ prompt! In reality, the flowers on the Ivy-Leaved Toad Flax are only about 1cm diameter - they really are tiny!

As you can see, the plant almost appears to have two poached egg eyes at the centre, as well as beautiful purple detailing, which I tried to capture in my coloured pencil study.

Open - pressed flowers

I knew that I wanted to depict a flower for the prompt of open, as so many blooms open during the day and close at night (or vice versa). In the end, I gently pressed two flowers - a daisy and a geranium - between two sheets of kitchen towel and a lot of heavy books for a couple of days, before sticking them down to my paper square. Incidentally, this is a Geranium sanguineum - Bloody Geranium, or Bloody Cranesbill, the County Flower of Northumberland.

Carl Linnaeus - the Swedish biologist and physician, heralded as the 'father of modern taxonomy' or the system of naming organisms - was fascinated by the ability of some plants to open and close their leaves or petals at set times or in response to certain stimuli., After years of careful observations, he grouped these plants, in Philosophia Botanica (1751), into those which varied their opening and closing times in response to the weather (Meteorici) or the length of the day (Tropici) and those which had fixed times for opening and closing (Aequinoctales).

There are just over 40 flowers that Linnaeus noted in the Aequinoctales group, including morning glories and wild roses which open at 5am, whilst passion flowers don’t open until midday. Scarlet pimpernels close at 2pm and evening primroses at 6pm, whilst dandelions open at 7am and close at 8pm!

In the air - a small linocut print

At this point in the summer I always make a point of noticing whether the swifts, swallows and martins are still swooping through the air, gathering insects, or whether they have left on their long journeys to Sub-Saharan Africa for the winter. There do still seem to be a few around and so I decided to feature a swift for my ‘in the air’ prompt. I wanted to try a technique that would allow me to show the movement of the bird through the air, so thought I’d try making a linocut print.

Lino cutting is a technique I’ve barely touched (although I’ve got all of the tools because many years ago I did a Christmas Card workshop that involved lino printing!) Again, I’m not sure if the small size of the squares for my Scavenger Hunt worked for or against me in this instance - there certainly wasn’t a huge amount of surface area to have to carve, but it was quite tricky both to get some detail in and also to ink up the lino to transfer a print.

In the end, the print came out fairly well and I’m pretty pleased with it, in that you can see that it is a bird! This has definitely inspired me to consider using my lino cutting tools a bit more regularly!

Did you know that the collective noun for a group of swifts is a ‘scream’?! They often spend their entire lives on the wing, including sleeping, mating, and drinking, so if you find one on the ground make sure to pick it up and place it somewhere safe (like a cardboard box) and see if you can find a local swift group who will have specialists who can provide care.

Final thoughts

I’m really enjoying the experience of slowing down and trying new things with this challenge and it is a great pleasure to see my Scavenger Hunt grid gradually filling up with all sorts of different nature I’ve noticed and recorded. I didn’t really plan out my prompts or responses, so I’m definitely coming down to ones I’m finding slightly trickier to complete - but then it wouldn’t be a challenge if it was easy!

If you’ve been following along with this challenge and you’d like to share any of your squares, please do add them in the comments below!

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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: