introducing HRH Queenie Poppet Anderson

My Mother visited last week (a kind of reunion, it has to be said, as we had not been in touch for a decade), and she brought me an 8 week old Tortoiseshell kitten, produced by her Calico cat, Rosie.
   Here she is!

 had to scrabble after her under a table and use the flash on her first evening

                 relaxed in Boris' bed under the telly. Boris furious.

                                          Bobbie is a devoted nanny

Go to the bureau, Queenie: find the papers from Cairo....and burn them..

                                                like a young Lauren Bacall

                                          turret exploration

tubes

I fixed the macro tubes to my camera today and went hunting around the garden for models, lots of Grandmother's Steps behind the insects. I started off with the tripod but it soon becomes hopeless where tiny animal photography is concerned, so i just had to try very hard to hold the camera steady. Am sitting with a hot water bottle on my right shoulder to aid recovery.

                     aphid stepping over spider lines on poppy leaf

rain water on poppy head

 

aphid on sunflower leaf

 

hoverfly on scabious

 

tiny beetle on sunflower petal

 

aphid family under poppy leaf

 

worth the frozen shoulder!

 

forecast to evaporate by Sunday lunchtime 

 

               synchronized tiny beetles on chrysanthemum bud


I'm not convinced the tubes reap any better results than the Raynox clip on lens does with the camera set to digital zoom x 2. Lens reversal ring on order (only 7 quid!).

p.v.a

I finally found the time and headspace to do some painting yesterday.

I had a lot of fun with acrylic paint on top of p.v.a glue which i then warmed up with the heat gun (as learnt from a YouTube video about homemade crackle medium). Crackling wasn't as crackly as i hoped it would be but i enjoyed making the glue under the paint bubble. This left a useful textural ground for future layers.
    Then i had a good slap, smear and scrape with oil paint and my palette knives. If i put acrylic on top of the partially dried oil paint layer today, i may get some better crackling. The basic rule of crackling is having a wet layer with a secondary layer which will dry quicker. It is the movement of the under layer drying beneath a skin of the already dry upper layer, which causes the cracking. An oil layer beneath a water based layer is probably the best method. I have done this by accident, i realized, when i read about it. But the pva was a worthwhile exercise as it's so versatile and surprising a medium.

I used a small decorating roller on the oil paint to nice effect and indulged in some Tonking. (Worth Googling!)

It was just SO nice to enjoy picture making again.

      In Other News, i have been very busy over the last fortnight making a dedicated photo-blog on WordPress. I have managed to do it but it felt like splitting the atom at times - unlike Blogger, you have to go through a baptism of amateur web design to achieve the objective. However, i still haven't worked out how to make it visible. So, it's really nice but it only exists on my own computer!

   Here's this month's bee of the week (as featured on rOtOgraphia at WordPress......).