Designing the Ammonoidea Print
Ammonites have always been a source of fascination for me, so it was probably only a matter of time before they worked their way into my art. They're so wonderfully round and spiralled, it's hard to believe that they were real critters swimming around in the ocean thousands of years ago.
This is my ammonite collection. Some of my earliest childhood memories are of Summers spent on the Dorset Coast, searching for fossils on the beach, or in museums with my nose pressed up against cabinets full of dinosaur bones.
Some designs just make sense to me in pencil rather than watercolour. I can get more detail in, and focus on depth and tone rather than on the interplay of colours. There is something hard about a pencil line compared to watercolour, and I think this emphasises the ancient, stone-like texture of these once living things.
I started off by just focussing on ammonites and orthaceros fossils, which are also common along the British coastline, but it became increasingly clear to me that the design was going to lack movement and dynamic if all the shapes were going to be rounded and circular, so I decided to introduce some other fossils into the mix.
