A few days ago I received a wonderful New Year gift in the post from my very talented friend Yoko – one of her minutely detailed and exquisitely coloured copperplate etchings, entitled ‘guardian dragon’ (in celebration of 2012, the year of the Dragon).

‘guardian dragon’ by Yoko Hayashi

We’re very honoured to have such a handsome creature watching over us in 2012 – thank you, Yoko!

You can find more of Yoko’s beautiful work on her blog or her Flickr photostream – if you’re in need of a bit of magic do go and have a look.

While on the subject of prints (and dragons), I am close to completing a new series of little screenprints (with the working title “an amateur naturalist’s specimen collection”). The series consists of eight specimens (each in an edition of 13), and some of the critters include hand-coloured details (which has been a time-consuming, but satisfyingly obsessive, process ;). Here is one of them, simply entitled ‘larva’ – he started out life as some sort of crustacean larva, but now that I know 2012 is the year of the Dragon I like to imagine that he might be a very young dragon…