Maramac specolates.

This week's theme for me: stuffed animals. The Specola had me running around like the 6-year-old I am, gawking at everything from the gruesomely impaled insects to the anatomically incorrect hippos. Multiple ideas began to take form in my head, elements I wanted to incorporate into upcoming projects.

Foremost was the idea of a field journal, something like what an 18th-century explorer might have kept. The watercolor pencil/ink combinations in my sketchbook reminded me of Audobon's illustrated birds, or some botanist's tropical fieldwork. I became interested in a sort of "Specola of a Specola," creating cutouts of these specimen-sketches and pasting them into another moleskin, much as the specimens themselves have been skinned and had their hides reassembled for display.

My latest development has been collecting receipts (a recent subject of interest), to create grounds from a commonly received but quickly forgotten object. And there are so many. A quick jaunt around the studio, requesting said unwanted objects, generated quite a handful. Considering their flimsy, "fluttery" quality, I decided to try doing cutouts or sketches of wings (insect, avian, or otherwise) upon the varying-sized papers. This morning was another spent in the Specola, where I tried to sketch as many differently-shaped wings as possible to try out on this new paper. Tonight's experimenting will hopefully show promising results...