Staffordshire pottery...

We were asked to use Staffordshire pottery as inspiration to design a series of plates.

I found the  pottery a little unsettling at first... but the more I saw of it the more I warmed to it.  I found a lot of the animals were in twos, so I kind of went with that idea and started drawing animals, some I drew with watercolour, some with pencils and some I drew digitally.

I got a bit stuck there and thought I needed another element, maybe trees... I remembered when we went walking in the woods a few years ago there were these native New Zealand Beech type trees, that had quite mossy mottled trunks... so I tried a few drawings of these to add to the plate.  I imagined my plates being a type of stoneware with an ochre rim.  

{plate #1 so far...}

I added red thread... I love the story of Ariadne and the maze in Greek mythology and have used red thread a lot in my work over the years.