Thursday, March 7, 2024

Triadic Colours, CYMK, Primary Colours, and Warm Colours and My Printer Solstice Prints

 

Ochre Sea Stars, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper
Ochre Sea Stars, linocut by Ele Willoughby on 8" x 8" washi paper

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt triadic colours, I choose the secondary colours orange, purple and green, which are three equidistant on the colour wheel. I was looking forward to #InsertAnInvert2024 and needing an intertidal creature.

My lino block print of two Pisaster ochraceus, generally known as the purple sea star, ochre sea star, or ochre starfish, on a bed of kelp, is hand-printed on 8" x 8" (20 cm x 20 cm) delicate white Japanese paper with bark inclusions. A common sea star, or starfish of the Pacific, it is a keystone species considered an indicator of health in the intertidal zone. Most of these starfish are purple but they can also come in orange (as shown), or ochre, yellow and brown.

These were amongst my favorite finds on the beaches of Vancouver Island.





A collection of small gel prints made with cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, cut paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt CMYK I spent a morning experimenting with my gel plate, using paper stencils, lino blocks and plant materials and my process cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks.

For the #PrinterSolstice prompt primary colours, I thought I would play with adding yellow and red to a cyanotype (which are in tones of blue of course). I decided to return to my idea of contrasting a fractal Sierpiński triangle and the naturally occurring fractal shape of a fern leaf. The Sierpiński triangle (also called the Sierpiński gasket or Sierpiński sieve) is a fractal equilateral triangle, subdivided recursively into smaller equilateral triangles. It's a self-similar sets—that is, it is a mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction named after the Polish mathematician Wacław Sierpiński. This was a decorative pattern many centuries before Sierpiński. I made a cyanotype of a fern leaf and used a gel plate to add a red circle. I lino block printed the yellow Sierpiński triangle.

Fractal Geometry, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Fractal Geometry, cyanotype with gel print and linocut, 9" x11" by Ele Willoughby, 2024
 

And for the final prompt warm colours, I looked ahead once again to prompts for #InsertAnInvert2024 and decided I needed to make a true crab.

Frog crab, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Frog crab, linocut print on washi paper, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2024

 My hand-printed red frog crab (Ranina ranina), also known as a spanner crab or Huỳnh Đế crab, is hand-printed on Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper 8" x 8" (20.3 cm x 20.3 cm) square. This crab is found in tropical and sub-tropical waters offshore Australia, the Philippines, Vietnam, the east coast of Africa, through the Indian ocean to  the Pacific offshore Japan and Hawai'i. It is the sole known member of its genus and it is fished for its meat. The 5.9" (15 cm) crabs live in 10 to 100 m (33–328 ft) or water, where they bury themselves in the sand during the day and hunt bottom-dwelling fish. Known as "frog crabs", on account of their elongated carapace and frog-like appearance. Their claws are modified into tools for digging, and the body is a rounded shape that is easy to bury in sand. Unlike most other true crabs, the abdomens of raninids are not curled under the cephalothorax, so they are a little unusual looking.

Ranina ranina is a regional specialty in some regions of the Philippines where it is known as curacha. It is generally eaten steamed as halabos, or cooked in coconut milk as ginataan. In Vietnam the species is named as "Huỳnh Đế crab", literally means "emperor crab" as it has been a favorite high-ranked cuisine of historical Vietnamese monarchs hailed "monarch of all the crab".

 

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Mussels and Chitons - New marine invertebrate prints

 Looking ahead to some #InsertAnInvert2024 prompts, I made some linocut marine invertebrates.


Blue Mussel, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Blue Mussel, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

The blue mussel (Mytilus edulis), or common mussel, is a medium-sized edible marine bivalve mollusc in the family Mytilidae. They are aptly called common mussels and are found on temperate beaches worldwide. They are also yummy.

A more complicated print is my lined chiton. They are extraordinary wee animals, which come in all sorts of colours. 

Lined Chiton, Linocut, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Lined Chiton, Linocut, 5" x 7" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

The lined chiton, Tonicella lineata, is a beautiful, colourful tiny marine mollusc of the North Pacific. Each 5 cm (2") long animal has zigzag purple or black lines on eight valves on a array of different colours like brown, red or burgundy like here but can also be bright blue or yellow to orange with a hairless girdle in colours like brown to red or pink, often with regular yellow or white patches. It is found from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska to San Miguel Island of California, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk of Russia and northern Japan in the intertidal to subtidal waters of 30 to 90 m (100 ft to 300 ft) depth. It's thought their colourful bodies are intended to camouflage against algae. They are prey of the ochre starfish.

Chitons are also sometimes known as sea cradles or coat-of-mail shells or suck-rocks, or more formally as loricates, polyplacophorans, and occasionally as polyplacophores.

Each print is made on 12.7 cm x 17.7 cm (5" x 7") printmaking paper. Because this is a reduction print, after each colour, I carved away more of the block, this is a limited edition of 12 prints. When they are gone, there will be no more originals.


Monday, February 5, 2024

Heart Cockles and Fuchsia Flatworm

 

Heart Cockles, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Heart Cockles, 6.5" x 8" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024 

Was thinking of both the #PrinterSolstice prompt monochromatic and the upcoming #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt infauna for March (shell month) when I made this print... and of course, Valentine's Day.

Corculum cardissa, the heart cockle, is a species of marine bivalve mollusc in the family Cardiidae found in the Indo-Pacific. If viewed from the side, it looks like a heart. There is a lot of colour variation in shells, but they often have patterns in coral pink like those in my print. Interestingly, the shells are translucent in places, allowing light in which benefits its symbiotic relationship with  photosynthesizing  dinoflagellates (zooxanthellae), which live within its tissues. The cockle takes in the dinoflagellates by its mouth. Their presence causes a tertiary series of tubules develop from the walls of the cockle's digestive system which are a safe environment for them to live and photosynthesize, producing metabolites which help the cockle.

The next #PrinterSolstice prompt was split complimentary and it lead me to another #InsertAnInvert2024 prompt. To make a split complimentary colour, choose two complimentary colours, like yellow and purple, and replace the second colour by the two colours adjacent to it on the colour wheel - fuchsia and indigo.

Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Fuchsia Flatworm, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

One of the suggested #InsertAnInvert2024 organisms is the strange and beautiful fuchsia flatworm (Pseudoceros ferrugineus) with its gorgeous aposematic colours, a warning to predators that it's not worth the trouble to try and eat. A flexible ruffled oval creature it is a little hard to capture but it does indeed have a split complementary colour scheme. It crawls around eating on the reefs of the Indo-Pacific without any fear of predators.

Friday, February 2, 2024

Annie Jump Cannon, Census Taker of the Sky

Annie Jump Cannon, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Annie Jump Cannon, 11" x 14" linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024

I knew the #PrinterSolstice prompt "spectrum" called for another scientist portrait!

My hand printed lino block portrait of trailblazing American astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) shows her with her stellar classification system which sorted stars based on spectral types and turned out to reveal their temperature from hot blue stars through cool red stars into O,B,A, F, G, K and M, as shown on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram behind her. Along with her supervisor Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, the first serious stellar classification scheme. The name, citing Harvard rather than Cannon herself, who still lacked a university appointment, makes her achievement less visible than it might have been.

The eldest of three daughters of Delaware shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Cannon and his second wife Mary Jump, Annie was born in Dover, Delaware. Her mother taught her the constellations, home economics (and the organization skills she would later need) and encouraged her to pursue her own interests. Annie and her mother used old astronomy textbooks to identify stars they could see by climbing out a trapdoor onto their roof. She studied mathematics, chemistry, and biology at Wellesley College, a top school for women, where she excelled at math. She studied physics with Sarah Frances Whiting, one of the few US women physicists at the time, and became the valedictorian. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1884 and returned home to Delaware. Over the next decade she studied the new art of photography, photographing her travels through Europe with her Blair box camera. The Blair company published her photos and prose about Spain, "In the Footsteps of Columbus" and distributed it as a souvenir at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

A cheerful and energetic person, she lost most of her hearing as a young adult, possibly due to scarlet fever. She found it made it hard to socialize. Then her mother died in 1894, which made family life difficult too. She wrote Sarah Frances Whiting seeking a job and was hired as a junior physics teacher, which allowed her to take graduate physics and astronomy classes and study spectroscopy on her own. She gained access to a better telescope by enrolling in Radcliffe College (a women's college affiliated with Harvard) in 1894 as a "special student" which allowed her to use the he Harvard College Observatory. Harvard astronomer Edward C. Pickering hired her as his assistant in 1896. He was running a program to map and catalogue every visible star in the sky to a photographic magnitude of about 9 (16 times fainter than visible by human eye alone) to complete the Henry Draper Catalogue, a research program fund by the widow of a wealthy physician and amateur astronomer. He hired men to do the physical jobs of operating heavy telescopes and making photographs. He hired and supervised a group of women (whom he could pay as little as 25 cents an hour to work seven hours a day, six days a week) known as the Harvard Computers to do examine data, do calculations and catalogue photos - work he did not deem proper scientific analysis. Though hired as mere "computers" this team included such astronomy luminaries as Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury who made important advancements in the field. Pickering wanted the optical spectra of as many spectra as possible with the goal of indexing and classifying stars by spectra. The Draper Catalogue became an indispensable tool for astronomers.

Cannon worked at the Observatory until 1940. In her first three years, she classified 1000 stars. By 1911 she was made the Curator of Astronomical Photographs at Harvard and by 1913 she had learned to accurately classify 200 stars an hour! She published her first star catalogue in 1901. She finished her studies at Wellesley and was awarded a master's in 1907. In 1927, Pickering  said "Miss Cannon is the only person in the world—man or woman—who can do this work so quickly," about her skills in star classification.

The classification work was begun by Nettie Farrar, but she left the Observatory after a few months to get married. Antonia Maury (the first person to detect an calculate the orbit of a spectroscopic binary, and Draper's niece) took over. She insisted on a complex scheme, to the dismay of project manager Williamina Fleming (who catalogues ten thousand stars, 59 gaseous nebulae, over 310 variable stars, 10 novae and other astronomical phenomena including discovering the Horsehead Nebula) who wanted a simpler scheme. Cannon negotiated a compromise, applying a scheme dividing of stars into the spectral classes O, B, A, F, G, K, M, based on the Balmer absorption lines of hydrogen. Later when the scheme was understood to reflect stellar temperatures her initial sequence of the classes was reordered to go from hot to cold.

Cannon excelled at the work thanks to her organizational skills and patience with the tediousness of the work. Her calm, friendly and hardworking personality lead her to a sort of ambassador-like role, brokering exchanges of equipment between male colleagues.  Nicknamed "Census Taker of the Sky,"  she catalogued an estimated  350,000 stars, more than any other person. She also discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary.

In 1914, she was admitted as an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society. Awarded an honorary doctor's degree in math and astronomy from Groningen University in 1921, she became one of the first women to receive an honorary doctorate from a European university. On May 9, 1922, the International Astronomical Union passed the resolution to formally adopt Cannon's stellar classification system. With minor changes (to include intensity as well as temperature) Annie Jump Cannon's classification system is still in use today. She got the opportunity to spend six months in Arequipa, Peru, photographing stars in the Southern hemisphere. In 1925 she became the first woman to receive an honorary science doctorate from Oxford and was elected to the American Philosophical Society. In 1929 she chosen as one of the "greatest living American women" by the League of Women Voters. In 1931, she was the first woman to win the Henry Draper Medal. In 1932 she won the Ellen Richards prize from the Association to Aid Scientific Research by Woman. She represented professional woman at at the World's Fair in Chicago in 1933. She became the William C. Bond Astronomer at Harvard University in 1938.

Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) used Cannon's data to show that stars are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium.

Cannon retired in 1940 but kept working at the Observatory until a few weeks before she died at 77. Her work helped women gain acceptance and respect in the field. A dedicated suffragette she was also a member of the National Women’s Party. As The Woman Citizen’s noted in 1924, despite her achievements “The traffic policeman on Harvard Square does not recognize her name. The brass and parades are missing. She steps into no polished limousine at the end of the day’s session to be driven by a liveried chauffeur to a marble mansion.” But her legacy lives on in the discoveries she made, the classification system she developed, and the trail she blazed for women in astronomy. In 1935 she created the Annie J. Cannon Prize, awarded by the American Astronomical Society, for "the woman of any country, whose contributions to the science of astronomy are the most distinguished." The first recipient became the first woman full professor of astronomy at Harvard: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Like her mother before her, and her first physics professor Sarah Frances Whiting, Annie was able to mentor and promote the next generation of women astronomers. Payne-Gaposchkin wrote in Science, upon her death, “On the thirteenth of April, 1941, the world lost a great scientist and a great woman, astronomy lost a distinguished contributor and countless human beings lost a beloved friend by the death of Miss Annie J. Cannon.” Harlow Shapely, Directory of the Harvard Observatory wrote, “Her official position at the Harvard Observatory was the William Cranch Bond Astronomer and Curator of the Photographic Collection. Her unofficial position was dean of women astronomers of the world and a leading and most honored woman scientist.”

 

References

Annie Jump Cannon, wikipedia, accessed February 2024 

Christ, Marian., Annie Jump Cannon, American Philosophical Society, January 16, 2022.

Geiling,  Natasha., The Women Who Mapped the Universe and Still Couldn’t Get Any Respect, Smithsonian Magazine, September 18, 2013

Murphy, Norah M., Eyes to the Sky: Annie Jump Cannon and the Harvard Observatory, The Harvard Crimsom, May 5, 2017

Stellar classification, wikipedia, accessed February 2024


Monday, January 22, 2024

Koi & Dog, some recent linocut prints

 

Koi linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Koi, linocut, 8" x 10" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

The 3rd prompt in the  Printer Solstice series this year was "complementary colours." I went for one of my favorite combinations: orange and blue and made a koi fish.

 

Before the holidays, I made some custom portraits for a family friend of their golden retriever, both a "head shot" and the complete dog.



Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Marine Biologist Maude Jane Delap and the Jellyfish

 

Maude  Delap, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024
Maude  Delap, linocut, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2024

The next prompt for #PrinterSolstice is "cool colours" and I was reminded of the sea, and a woman suggested to me for my women in STEM series. 

This is my linocut portrait of self-taught trail-blazing Irish marine biologist Maude Jane Delap (1866 – 1953) who was the first person to successfully breed jellyfish in captivity and document their full lifecycle, something extraordinarily hard to do. Her work is still cited in laboratory manuals for jellyfish rearing. She made an extensive study of plankton over many years near her remote home on Valentia Island, off Ireland's west coast. She also discovered a sea anemone named in her honour, Edwardsia delapiae. In my portrait she is surrounded by different stages in the blue jellyfish (Cyanea lamarckii) based on her own illustrations of her published research.

Born the seventh of ten children to Rev Alexander Delap and Anna Jane (née Goslett) in Templecrone Rectory, County Donegal, Maude moved with her family to Valentia Island at age 8. Her father had been assigned to the parishes of Valentia and Cahersiveen, and, a keen sailor, he sailed around the coast with two of her brothers. Their possessions, following in a second boat, arrived a little worse for wear. Her mother and the rest of the children travelled by train. While the girls had less formal education than their brothers, they had some progressive primary school education and their naturalist father encouraged Maude and her sister Constance (1868–1935) in their interest in biology and zoology. He himself had published articles in the Irish Naturalist and the whole family were avid naturalists. Maude and Constance became prolific collectors of marine specimen, many of which are still housed by the Natural History Museum, Dublin. Maude and her sister got reports from visiting fishermen of interesting species in all the their catch, for which they would pay a few shillings, encouraging what is now often known as "citizen science" or "community science."  They were sometimes invited aboard to observe finds and jellyfish. Since the family enjoyed boating and fishing, Maude and Constance learned how to handle a boat and would row out alone, exploring the coast and caves. The Fisheries Board granted them part-time access to their steam boat for their research.

The sisters' work lead to a survey by the Royal Irish Academy headed by Edward T. Browne of University College London in 1895 and 1896. Browne was particularly interested in plankton, the floating marine organisms ranging in size from microbes to large jellyfish, which are often the basis of the food chain and indicative of ocean health. Maude and Constance continued with their systematic study, gathering specimen of often tiny jellyfish and plankton by dredging and tow-netting, as well as recording sea temperature and changes in marine life for 28 years! They brought specimen back to the lab to identify and sketch them. Maude's patience, attention to detail, skill with her microscope and as an artist allowed her to document microscopic details of jellyfish structures and organs. Maude corresponded with Browne for forty years until his death in 1937. It's speculated that she had fallen in love with him; it was unrequited and he married a colleague. She sent him a box of violets she grew in her garden each year for his birthday. Browne thanked both sisters in his publications and jointly published research with Maude.

Maude became fascinated by the life cycle of jellyfish. She painstakingly developed a means of keeping them alive in captivity - something which other scientists had struggled and failed to achieve. She determined their diet, at each stage of development, through trial and error and explained the paramount role proper diet plays in being able to keep them in captivity. She changed the water daily, adjusting temperature to match that in the habour, where they thrived, and carefully monitored the jellyfish. She was the first person to breed them successfully in her home laboratory. The life cycle of the jellyfish is unusual: an adult medusa can procreate by producing a planuala (or egg), which implants on a surface like the seafloor and grows into a polyp (which looks a little like a plant rooted in the ground). The polyp can grow into a budding polyp. This stage of the cycle can go either direction; in less than optimal conditions the budding polyp can revert to the polyp stage. In optimal conditions the budding polyp will bud off ephyrae and these eventually grow into adult medusae. Previous to Delap's work, these various stages could be misinterpreted as separate species. She bred four species of jellyfish including Chrysaora isosceles (the compass jellyfish) and Cyanea lamarckii (the blue jellyfish shown in my print) and documented their life cycles and feeding habits and published her results. Her trailblazing research was the first identification of the various life cycle stages (medusa and hydra) that belong to which species. Quite unusually for a woman at the time, Maude published several influential scientific papers under her own name: she published six articles, and three short notes, including two co-authored by Constance. Thanks to her contributions to marine biology she was offered a position in 1906 at the Plymouth Marine Biological Station in England. She declined the job; her father had apparently declared,  "No daughter of mine will leave home, except as a married woman." While this lost opportunity must have been an immense disappointment, she continued her work at home. Leaving Valentia, and her sisters, at age 40 might also have been quite a daunting prospect. Staying in Valentia allowed her to produce her incredible lengthy study of Valentia harbour, and support her unmarried sisters for the rest of their lives, growing and fishing for food and earning income from selling flowers from her garden.

When her father died later that year, the her mothers, two sisters and Maude moved out of the Parsonage and were permitted to use Reenellen House by the Knight of Kerry. There, they hosted many guests including friends, family, visiting scientists and naturalists, and fishermen seeking safety and shelter in bad weather. While remote, Valentia was home to a telegraph station which was the European terminus for the trans-Atlantic cable, a weather station and an observatory, which did lead to a number of visiting engineers, scientists and marine biologist. The Delap sisters were highly-regarded members of their community, who helped run the local cottage hospital and fisherman's hall, known for their charity and generosity but also for wearing outdated Edwardian clothes, both for propriety and economic necessity. Her nephews recalled going fishing in the evening to feed all the guests, along with fruits and vegetables they grew in the garden. They set up a laboratory they fondly dubbed "The Department" which was described by her nephew as an "heroic jumble of books, specimens, aquaria, with its pervasive low-tide smell." Aquaria contained not only jellyfish, but fish, starfish and even a thornback ray Maude reared from an egg. She buried dead marine vertebrates in her garden to recover their skeletons.

In 1920, as the official whale-stranding officer for south west Ireland, appointed by the British Museum and the local contact for interesting wildlife, she was alerted to a stranded 16-foot whale on the rocks beyond the lighthouse. So she rowed out with her handyman, and she correctly identified a rare True's beaked whale, only previously been known from an incomplete US specimen. Unable to save it, she sent its head and flippers (on request) to the Natural History Museum and buried the rest in her garden. The Museum later requested the rest of the skeleton, causing her to dig up her asparagus garden to gather them. The Museum wrote again that two tiny vestigial pelvic bones were missing so Maude dug up her garden again and sieved the soil until she received a telegram from the Museum which read, “Stop! New York Museum informs us that True’s beaked whale does not possess vestigial pelvic bones."  

In 1928, she found a previously undescribed sea anemone burrowing deep into the eelgrass. Named in her honour, the Burrowing Sea Anemone (Edwardsia delapiae) has only been observed in Valentia habour.  In 1936, she was made an associate of the Linnean Society of London. In 1937 she was made an associate member of the Marine Biological Association. She submitted specimen and corresponded with the Natural History Museum from 1894 until 1949, when she was 83. Like her father before her, she submitted observations to Dr Scully’s “Flora and Fauna of Kerry” and both are acknowledged in the text. Maude was also interested in folklore, geology, botany and archaeology and she published several papers in the Kerry Archaeological Magazine. Her grand-nephew recalled Maude, the "old-school Victorian all-round naturalist”, saying, “Wherever we went, she was instantly recognized and greeted with delight”. She died in 1953, and was buried alongside her sisters near Knightstown, Valentia Island, County Kerry. There is now a plaque from the Irish National Committee for Commemorative Plaques in Science and Technology to commemorate her and her work, on the island.

 

References,

Byrne, Patricia M. Delap, Maude Jane. Dictionary of Irish Biography.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002516.v1
Originally published October 2009 as part of the Dictionary of Irish Biography
Last revised October 2009
 

M. J. Delap. 1905. Notes on the rearing, in an aquarium of Cyanea Lamarcki, Peron et Lesueur. Annual report of Fisheries, Ireland 1902-03. II (I(ii)) 20-22.

Maude Delap, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2024. 

Muka, Samantha Kay. Maude Delap: Jellyfish Goddess of the North Atlantic, Through the Aquarium Glass blog, October 29, 2012.

Sheehan, Jane. Finding Maude DelapLIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum blog, accessed January, 2024

Sheehan, Jane. Finding Maude Delap, Online Lunchetime Talk, LIVE – Llŷn, Iveragh Ecomuseum, YouTube, February 11, 2022.

Sheehan, Jane. Maude Delap Heritage Trail. 27 July 2023. (Accessed January 2024)


Friday, December 29, 2023

Printer Solstice is back and all about colour!

 

Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023
Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023

I always enjoy the #PrinterSolstice series of prompts. I gets me started on my year of printmaking, often trying new things. This year the prompts are all about colour. I am all about colour... but this will be a challenge, as I often carve first, plan colours second. Especially the first two prompts: the absence of colour and tetradic colours.

Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023
Snowflakes, blind embossed print by Ele Willoughby, 2023

I love colour... so the absence of colour is less than obvious for me. I could certainly work in black and white, but I decided to go all out and make a blind embossed print without any ink at all. Using moistened water colour paper, a carved lino block and my etching press, I made a print with the texture of snowflakes.

I had to look up "tetradic colours." It's a colour scheme of four colours equidistant on the colour wheel. People describe it as vibrant or even aggressive.  So, that took some planning! I have been thinking of adding to my collection of prints of arctic animals with the aurora. I read about a legend from Finland that the aurora is cause by the "fire fox," a fast running arctic fox whose big busy tail brushes sprays of snowflakes up into the sky. So I loved the idea of a print which straddles the natural history and the folklore collections of prints. The colourful Northern Lights gave me a way of working four colours into a cohesive design.

The rest of the prompts should be easier for me, but I still have a lot of planning and imagining to do. They remaining prints will feature: complementary colours, cool colours, analogous colours, monochromatic colour scheme, split complementary colours, spectrum of colours, CMYK colours, triadic colours, primary colours and warm colours.