🐇🌱Bonus bunny! Painted with plants. (Buckthorn, wild grape, oak gall, avocado, and sumac.)
🚁🌻: Before the bunny, I actually started off painting a cool hover fly that Neil photographed in the garden (pics 2 and 3). I noticed it not only looked very bee-like, but it was interacting with the flower in a very bee-like way. So I fell down a whole rabbit hole (hehe) learning about hover flies, and how they are a super important pollinator! Adult hover flies feed on nectar and pollen, and are “often considered the second-most important group of pollinators after wild bees.” (🤯) So they don’t just look like a bee, they be like one too!
☣️💪🐍: Critters mimicry of each other is so fascinating. In Thomas Halliday’s book “Otherlands”, he describes how slow loris, when threatened, imitate a spectacled cobra. They raise their arms up behind their head, shiver, and hiss. From this position they can also access a gland in their armpit which, when combined with saliva, produces a venom “capable of causing anaphylactic shock in humans”. (🤯🤯)
I didn’t even know it was possible to have armpit envy, and yet, here I am.
🐇📚: Well look at that, cute bunny, you’ve tricked us into learning about hover flies AND a different kind of “pit viper”. Well played little lagomorph, well played!
Have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend folks. Happy August!
Painted with plants — a sketchy pigeon, full of gall.
Sketched this pigeon last night, to try out a new oak gall ink! I’ve been collecting oak galls one and two at a time for a few years now, and decided I had enough to make a batch.
(The story of making the ink is even more colourful than the pigeon, and I’ll pop it up here at some point. Spoiler: At one point a mason jar containing 4 years worth of galls shatters…)
I’m really happy with how the gall ink turned out. I may try reducing some of it further, but as it is now it layers to a nice respectable black. Thanks gall wasps!
This pigeon is a mutt of a few different ideas at once. I wanted to try using my inks for something more stylized and a little looser. So his look is a bit conflicted, but I’m going to take some seed ideas from here and make another. More pigeons to come!
Pigeon is painted with all homemade inks. The inks used here are made from wild grapes, oak galls, grapevine, avocado pits.
Why build a nursery for your baby when you could have an oak tree do it for you?
The adult gall wasp lays its egg in a growing part of the tree, like a leaf bud, in the spring. The oak responds to the activity by forming a growth around the disturbance – a gall. The gall contains the wasp, but also… contains it. The little wasp egg gets a snug little nursery, both shelter and food – free room and board — as it feeds on the still growing and nutritious walls of its home. When the baby wasp is all done growing up, it chews a little round exit hole for itself (seen in the photo of galls above). Off the wasp goes to begin the cycle all over again.
There are many insects, fungi, bacteria, etc that result in the growth of galls. Large oak galls like the ones shown above are likely made by the Amphibolips quercusinanis wasp.
These galls often fall to the forest floor, bright green with red spots when fresh, drying to papery brown. They’re one of the treasures I keep an eye out for when I’m out for a walk, as they’re a key ingredient in a historic natural ink. I find the wild turkeys are great friends to me in this quest, as they seem to leave the gall behind when they dig up the forest floor. See the photo below for an oak gall as I found it, in a perfect tiny clearing. Thanks turkeys!
Mixing oak galls with iron salts results in a rich black ink (albeit one that sometimes eats through paper). It’s a project I’ve had percolating for a few years now, and I hope to make a batch this spring/summer. Collecting enough of the right galls has been a slow but very enjoyable process. And I almost always remember that I put a papery delicate gall in my pocket and don’t crumble it to dust by jamming a chilly hand quickly in a pocket later on the same walk. Almost always.
Prefer to listen to the story? Click the image above to hear the audio version of this entry.
It’s been awhile since I’ve added to my collection of Wild Inklings. Fortunately my homemade wild inks are very patient, chilling out on the top shelf of our fridge, waiting for their next field trip. And Neil, lovingly and patiently, accommodates that sometimes his morning marmalade migrates behind my rows of glass bottles, each one filled with mysterious murk. The contents of which are not suitable for spreading on crumpets… probably.
I’ve enjoyed experimenting in many different mediums, but the moment I made my first wild ink, I was home. Painting nature-with-nature is pure magic. I enjoy the forage, the secret colours, and the alchemy on the page. I love to watch the hues change as they land wet on the paper, and as they settle into themselves over time. I love that the quest for colours is tied to the seasons — horsetail strobili in the spring, goldenrod in late summer, wild grapes in the fall. I love that the seasons swirl together in the created image. I love that you can use a dandelion to paint an acorn, or sketch a moose with a grape. Render a flower out of sumac, or create a bird from a charred vine.
Beginnings.
The more I use this wild palette, the more I understand it, but it is also made of organic matter, and full of surprises. So when I paint with these inks, I am not 100% in control, and, more and more, I am not trying to be. I would like to paint a hawk, but the exact how and what of the hawk, that remains to be seen. I discover it along the way. It’s an exercise in exploring what is possible with what is at hand. This practice in letting go is good for my brain, which, like the brains of so many other humans, is so much more comfortable with hanging on.
Neil is a wonderful painter in his own medium: building and finishing miniature figures. Some of what he does is very specific, and he watches video tutorials to improve his skills. One of the creators he follows advocates “painting bravely” and it’s an idea I come back to again and again when I’m painting. Some activities I do in life have high stakes, but painting is not one of them. If I make a “mistake”, really, really, it doesn’t matter at all. So some ink ends up on the page in an unintended place. A colour combo doesn’t look great. So what. I like to be evidence-based, and so far the world has continued to spin each time, weird blobby of ink on the page or not.
When I’m doing well at “painting bravely”, again and again I try the thing that makes me nervous. I push my own edge. And for nearly each painting I have done, my favourite part of the image will be created in the moments just after I whisper to myself, “…paint bravely”. Even if the aesthetics of what comes out of the brush doesn’t work, the bravery, that you get to keep.
Here are a few photos to show how one of these wild inklings comes together. This time a hawk, rendered in inks from: sumac, wild grape, buckthorn berries, horsetail strobili, acorns. The painting’s creation supported by a combination of good music, reference photos, my inks, my tiny brush, and the constant reminder to “paint bravely”.
