June was a busy making month for me. The winter months are great for creating, with the weather cold outside and no distractions calling from my neglected garden or a stunning day too good to spend inside. I’ve been expanding on my work with a series of ‘travellers’, figurines with structures and riders going who-knows-where, alongside some wall-hung lizards.

I’ve been expanding on the theme of Travellers

I’ve been making some quite elaborate figurines, re-introducing some possum fur on some, which changes the look and feel significantly and also playing a bit more with colour. When making a fantasy animal, I’m aiming for something believable and colour is a big part of it. With the figurine above, I wanted a stony grey to help project a strong powerful animal.

I’ve given some thought to when I decide the colour of a piece and it seems to come during the making, not definite, but a hazy start of an idea as the piece is taking shape. I don’t tend to plan ahead with drawings, but there is a loose picture in my head I’m working to.

At this stage I’m forming some ideas about colours.

My preference is for darker colours but I love the clean white when shaping the piece. There are some rules when trying to make a fantasy animal and keeping some believable aspects to it. In thinking about what I do and trying to explain it I’ve realized I do work to some inner rules, and not as carefree as I thought I was!

Reptile-type critters and birds can be almost any colour and pull it off, but I’ve found more natural colours work better on the horse-cat-bull creatures. I think it’s to do with my brain making sense of a piece, I can head towards reds with these, but a green would look odd. Of course there’s always exceptions, as in my circus-themed piece (a horse can be blue when it’s a circus horse). I may be making random rules but they make sense to me. Chagall had awesome green horses and blue goats so he clearly had some different rules.

I thought I needed to try a white animal and ended up with a completely different feel. I love how a work that starts out as a hazy idea gradually solidifies into something real, often surprising me. This happened with' ‘The search’, I wanted to make a white piece which seemed to call for a finer-built animal. I also popped a pearly white in the mix, painted over a darker undercoat. The pearl doesn’t show up as well in photos but just adds a gentle sheen.

White, so often associated with purity, innocence and goodness added another element to the piece. These Travellers are on some sort of quest for the greater good. White does seem to bring a mystical, ethereal quality to the mix.

While on a white theme I thought about a wall-hung lizard and the effect was different again. Most of my wall-hung lizards are darker, in shades of green. The white looks completely different, somehow more solid against the wall.

most my wall-hung lizards are in shades of green.

Colour has endless possibilities for changing the feel of an artwork and has endless associations for us, personal, emotive and cultural. If I think of any word, lawn, moss, sea, sky, cloud, rug, chair and a picture will form in my head with colour and feeling.