
It would seem that the winteriness has well and truly burrowed its way into my subconscious as a while ago I had a weird dream (aren’t they all?) in which two indistinct, ghostly figures with insubstantial, attenuated bodies and shadowy mask-like faces were moving through the hushed silence of a snow covered forest. A white rabbit and a brown owl were their travelling companions. They appeared to hover just above the thick drifts of snow and made their way tentatively through the trees.

When I woke up I had a single vivid image in my mind, like a film still, and I thought it might make a cool diorama / mixed media assemblage thingy. So I set to work with watercolour & pencil crayons, paper & scalpel, and a couple of blobs of polymer clay for those elusive mask-like faces.
Although the finished diorama isn’t quite how I’d envisioned it in my mind’s eye (that clear ‘still image’ I had immediately on waking has faded and been distorted in the making) it was a really fun project. Admittedly lots of the fun was had in mucking around with the component parts during construction…

component parts in the making…

forget the yeti – giant owl spotted in local woods!

it’s raining Fimo face failures!

my studio companion, the inimitable chibi totoro, tries the work-in-progress forest on for size (his verdict: “I can unequivocally say that I prefer the Teutoburg Forest“)

when imaginary and real world trees meet

‘winter wood wraiths’ diorama, ±22×22cm








































