Category: Uncategorized

​We love to fill our home with art, craft, and decorations made by local makers.
We continue our tour of the house, which started with the art and craft chez Copper Catkin part 1, and continued in part 2.

We step through from the kitchen into the dining room, where we have a mixture of 1970s Etruscan prints from the Tomb of the Augurs, hand-painted Greek musuem copies, Persian prints in hand-enamelled frames, sculptures from our wedding, and the other set of whio from our laser cut designs.

​We have handmade goodness throughout the house, particularly where we spend the most time. The cushions on the couches are an assortment of handmade and custom-printed, with some souvenirs and some old memories, too. It faces my plant shelf, with my succulents in test-tubes and flasks from What The Fox.

​And here we have a clock featuring a design I did to celebrate and thank our wedding attendees, showing the wedding party and our close families in costume as paper dolls, and a moody photo of 15-year-old me that actually won a prize.

The photographer stopped us in Cuba Mall and asked us to pose, which we did with all the teenage angst we could muster. Years later, we were both working on King John, that year’s Summer Shakespeare, when he recognised me and gifted me a print.

​Under the photo are two out-of-date calendars, one of Samoan birds, and one with an actual piece of hand-woven rug from the lady who repaired my Persian carpet.

​In the other living space, which we are mainly using for sorting, we also have our wedding centrepiece. Click on the photos to read about how we made it.

​On the walls behind the crafting nook are the two parts of my Sir Peter Blake mixed media artwork painted in 2009, chronicling his career via the types of craft he sailed.

In the hallway, we have our laser-cut and hand-painted kererū, and an exciting new calendar by Melissa Boardman.

When it has finished doing duty at markets as a thread-painting example, we will also have my kererū​ embroidery on the wall in here.

​In my office, I have a Zamm Lights lamp and a souvenir plate from Samoa, and in the spare room, we have a cute leaf cushion from Knack craft market, and a crocheted blanket for guests (because I always feel colder at other people’s houses, don’t you?).

​I absolutely love to have my garden full of art and solar lighting, but as we are moving, we have been very restrained and only decorated with this lovely kererū pair by Metalbird New Zealand. It’s so very beautiful.

​We spent some considerable time in consultation with LisaSarah Steel Designs to get our custom numbers made (the delays were all at our end), and then we had to wait even longer for the wall to be painted so that we could put them up, but we finally got there.

​The wall is curved, and the sun was going down by the time we had finished, but no way was I missing out on a photo to commemorate it on the day, lol. 

Thanks for joining us for a little tour – we have so much good stuff that we bought from so many talented people over years of collecting. It’s been really lovely to go through photos and walk around the house, really looking at what we have. I am very grateful for the opportunity to make my home feel beautiful and support local makers, and I look forward to adding to our collection in the next home, too!

So we have worked our way through the 23 most endangered species of native birds in New Zealand, and, as I discussed initially, I will then turn them into a 24-bird design, to echo the concept of an advent calendar – but here, we are documenting the advent of their extinction. 

​Choosing a 24th bird ended up being easy – I was concerned for a while that the winner might be a bird that I had already drawn, and I had no desire to start on the next section of the DOC list, as that would pretty much force me to keep going until I had finished them all. And birds are great, but I need a break.

Luckily for me, the winner of the 2019 Bird of the Year competition is the Hoiho (Yellow-eyed penguin). I haven’t drawn a penguin yet, so that’s an added bonus. 

One really important thing to mention is that, even though the Hoiho are not actually in any of the three lists on the DOC endangered species page, that’s actually an indicator of how very endangered the listed species are – because with a conservation status of “in serious trouble”, Yellow-eyed penguins (hoiho) are disappearing before our eyes. They are one of the rarest penguins in the world with just 1,700 pairs remaining. 

If nothing is done to reverse current declines, scientists predict they could be extinct on mainland New Zealand within 10 – 20 years.
Source:
Bird of the Year

A tall, portly penguin with a pale yellow band of feathers that runs from each yellow eye around the nape, a long straight red-brown and pale cream bill, and pink and black feet. The rest of the head, neck and dorsal surface is slate blue; the breast and belly white down to the feet.
Source:
NZ Birds online

Very fast sketches of the underlying structure.

This chonky boi Hoiho is channeling Lizzo – all attitude and rocking that thicc body. Love it.

The Hoiho has a lot of its own colours – more than expected when you just look at it. The beak and the eyes are actually quite complex. I have, of course, simplified the lines and the colours to fit my style.

And that’s the lot! 24 birds, in slightly more than 24 business days. What a ride! What was your favourite?

In the best possible way, it feels like my whole life has been about encouraging other people to find their creative outlets.
Ever since I started drawing, as far back as I can remember, people would ask me to draw things for them. Just like the narrator in Le Petit Prince, when asked to draw a sheep, at first I did exactly what I thought they wanted, but gradually learnt that what people really need is a prompt for their imagination.

​I remember at primary school, other kids would sneak over and ask me to help them draw whatever we were set to do – I learnt quickly to give them something that they could complete themselves, rather than to do the whole thing for them, because

• I ran out of time to do my own work,
• the other kids were much less resentful when I just helped rather than taking over, and
• the teachers were less likely to growl at me if I just gave others a bit of a push rather than doing all their work.

​I have always been the oldest kid in my family – the eldest sibling, the eldest cousin – so I was also generally the one who came up with the things to do – creating workbooks to teach my sibling French when we moved to Belgium, or treasure hunts to keep the kids busy at our family holiday home at the Rakaia River mouth in Canterbury. I still do that as an adult – here’s a project from a few years ago at a family reunion, where the kids and I labelled parts of the property and then I got them photocopied and we all coloured them in.

As I grew older, I heard more and more people telling me that they “just can’t do creative stuff”, which made me so sad.

I often think about those kids in my class, who would sometimes get impatient when I wouldn’t just do their work for them, but who were so happy with the finished pieces that they had made from the starting points that I gave them.

​Coming up with gateways to creativity has always been something I enjoyed doing, so I thought – why not try my hand at selling my creations in kitset formats? It’s not like I haven’t done it before!

Many of you may know that I used to sell my wares as “Phersu Dancing Jewellery and Treasures”, which became Phersu Dancing Designs. You can read more about that story here.

​As I was finishing my beading phase and moving into making glass cabochon jewellery, I offered classes, workshops, and earring-making kits, which were quite popular as stocking stuffers. I later packaged the remaining beads up as my Surprise Supplies.

Once I had reincarnated myself as Copper Catkin, I really leaned into my “ligne claire” style, which obviously lends itself really well to being coloured in – it is, after all, what I do with all of my designs, so why wouldn’t anyone else enjoy it? So I started taking my drawings and turning them into something colourable – patches and colour-cut-and-sew cushions came first.

When both of these were reasonably successful, I began planning colouring books – but I would have to make quite a few changes to my existing designs in order to make them suitable for a colouring book format, so it made the most sense to use my next big series of designs for the first book, while I worked in the background to reconfigure my other designs to suit. 

I decided that it would be fun to ask my Facebook page followers to supply me with some models for my next series of drawings, so after some discussion, I decided that drawing people’s pet dogs would be fun – and it would be a cool celebration of Woolfenoot, too! It was remarkably successful – I got more photos than I could possibly draw! I drew the first 50, and had to call it there.

I used a combination of tracing, to make sure that I had the features in the correct position, and freehand portraiture to add the feeling of the dogs’ personalities – copying exactly from a photo can be very difficult, especially when you work with thick, black lines – think about all those terrible tattoo portrait failures that they love to show us on reality TV shows – so the art of it lies in choosing which lines to use, and which lines to omit. 

Of course, I made the design into fabrics and accessories, so they are available on Spoonflower and Redbubble. 

It was so exciting when my first box of colouring books arrived! Of course I had to do my own awkward version of an unboxing.

I invite you to join me for a flick through the book below.

Of course, once the DOGS colouring book was done, I had to follow it up with CATS. I asked the team from Outpawed along to the Petone Winter Markets, where they agreed to provide food in the form of a bake sale in exchange for a fundraising opportunity, so it made sense to draw cats for the posters. 

To help publicise the event and raise more funds, we also used the posters as a colouring competition, so I knew that they worked well as colourables.
Read more about my “cats” design here.

The cats from the 2018 posters also went into the book. Here they all are in full colour:

I had also done a few extra designs as options for the market themes, so they were included in the colouring book as special bonuses.

Come and have a tour of that book with me in this video!

My other books came all in a big rush – I had been gathering and editing the images for some time, and so they were all ready to order together. I now had a range of six different colouring books, all ready in time for the Omaka Airshow.  

Speaking of Omaka, their “Women in Aviation” theme was the main driver behind this series of designs. I had actually already started to consider it, but when the theme was released, I knew that it was time to revisit and refresh my original “aviatrix” designs.

You can read more about this design in my aviatrices post, too, if you want some more background.

My “ROSES” book was made at the request of several people who asked for roses, and using my photos from our trip to Portland, Oregon, the “City of Roses“.

This design is also available as fabric, earrings, and scarves, too. 

The FLORA and NGA MANU collections pull together some of my most popular drawings ever – and there is some crossover, as many people only want to buy one colouring book. The good thing about a bit of crossover, too, is that families with several children can have some images in common, while still getting their own designs to colour in, too.

Named for my maternal grandmother, and filled with the top choices from my back catalogue of plants and trees, this is a great collection for meditative colouring, with complicated repeats and simpler motifs to give a range of choices, depending on how much time and commitment you have.

​At our place, we are surrounded by native bush and native birds, so it makes sense that they both show up a lot in my designs. 

In the process of researching the possible names for the book, I also discovered that the meaning of “manu” is actually broader than I thought, too, so I added a few other things that fly.

Of course, as mentioned above, these designs combine both birds and plants, so versions of some of them can be found in both “FLORA” and “NGA MANU”.

You can go and watch videos of my colouring books on YouTube, here:

You can buy my colouring books from my Etsy store, here:

At first glance, the Pacific white tern looks a great deal like the New Zealand fairy tern or tara iti, so the first step is to establish the differences between them.

Right, so basically, the white tern is like a fairy tern in goth makeup – all white except for exaggerated black lines around the eyes. Other than that, they seem to be structurally very similar. 

The initial sketches are done, time to fill them out. 

At least the colouring stage isn’t arduous! I made sure that the shades of white matched the tara iti design, and that the little details like beaks and feet were the right colour, and it was sorted!

All done!

​Pitt Island is the second largest island in the Chatham Archipelago, New Zealand. It is called Rangiauria in Māori and Rangiaotea in Moriori.
Source:
Wikipedia

We have seen several other species from the Chatham Islands in this series:

• chatham islands black robin
• chatham island oystercatcher or torea
• chatham island shag
• kermadec white-faced storm petrel​

The Pitt Island shag is a critically endangered shag restricted to the Chatham Islands. As the only small slender grey shag with yellow feet in the islands, it is easily recognised. Despite its declining population, it can readily be found breeding and roosting in small groups along the rocky coast line throughout the group. It is a marine species that breeds and roosts on rocky headlands and offshore islets and within parts of the brackish Te Whanga Lagoon.
Source:
NZ Birds online

​No consistent distinction exists between cormorants and shags. The names ‘cormorant’ and ‘shag’ were originally the common names of the two species of the family found in Great Britain, Phalacrocorax carbo (now referred to by ornithologists as the great cormorant) and P. aristotelis (the European shag). “Shag” refers to the bird’s crest, which the British forms of the great cormorant lack. As other species were encountered by English-speaking sailors and explorers elsewhere in the world, some were called cormorants and some shags, depending on whether they had crests or not. Sometimes the same species is called a cormorant in one part of the world and a shag in another, e.g., the great cormorant is called the black shag in New Zealand (the birds found in Australasia have a crest that is absent in European members of the species).
Source:
​Wikipedia

A small, slender grey marine shag of the Chatham Islands, with yellow feet and a very slender bill. In breeding plumage it has a blackish head with a prominent double crest.
​​Source:
NZ Birds online

This bird puts on a show for breeding season, so I think I will draw it in all its finery, double crest and all.

This one required colours from several designs, which was fun to figure out.

And there we go – one quirky wee shag.

Rock wren are our only true alpine bird. It is unknown how they survive the harsh climate above the tree line all year round, but it is likely they continue to forage on rocky bluffs where snow has not collected and amongst large boulder fields. Some have suggested they may have a period of semi-hibernation.
Source:
DOC

This bird has so many names:
New Zealand rock wren, pīwauwau, piwauwau, mātuitui, matuitui, South Island wren, tuke
​Source:
NZ birds online

​The New Zealand rock wren (Xenicus gilviventris) is a small New Zealand wren (family Acanthisittidae) endemic to the South Island of New Zealand. Its Māori names include pīwauwau (“little complaining bird”), mātuitui, and tuke (“twitch”, after its bobbing motion). Outside New Zealand it is sometimes known as the rockwren or South Island wren to distinguish it from the unrelated rock wren of North America.
Source:
Wikipedia

The rock wren is a very small, almost tailless bird that prefers to hop and run on its long legs, and uses its rounded wings to fly only short distances. Males are 16 g, females 20 g. Males are greenish with yellow flanks and a pale underside, females tend to be browner, although the degree of difference between the sexes varies geographically.
Source:
​Wikipedia

The New Zealand wrens, Acanthisittidae, are a group that has been isolated for so long from its unknown primitive passerine (the ‘singing’ birds, which make up over half of all living bird species) ancestral stock as to have become an endemic infraorder. This family, including the rifleman, the rock wren (seen on postage stamps), and the bush wren (as well as several extinct species), consists of small, poor-flying and flightless insect-eating birds that have been distributed up and down the length of New Zealand, but are now much more restricted. 
Source:
NEW ZEALAND SCIENCE TEACHER
This extract is from a really interesting short article about the evolution of wrens in New Zealand. I recommend reading it – it’s quick, and accessible. The first thing I thought when I looked at these photos was how much they reminded me of the wee rifleman that I drew as part of my native birds design.

As usual, feet are the fiddliest bit.

But I think they have come out nicely!

Lots of fiddling with shades, and a brand-new palette for this one – apart from the beak and eyes.

And we’re all sorted!

​I have already drawn two other birds referred to as “toroa” in this series. So, how do we differentiate between them?

OK, so, both.
A mollymawk is a type of albatross.

Salvin’s mollymawk is a typical medium-sized albatross. It is black across the upperwings, with a white lower back and rump and black tip to the tail. The underparts are white with narrow black borders under the wing and a small black notch in the “armpit” at the base of the leading edge of the wing. The head, throat and nape are pale grey, creating a hooded effect. The bill is grey-green, with a paler top and bottom and a black spot at the tip of the lower bill. Juveniles fledge with olive-brown bills with a dark tip, but apparently immediately depart New Zealand waters, and do not return until they have adult colouration.
Source:
​NZ birds online

Ok, that’s convenient – they look pretty different from the other two toroa. But there are other species that are very similar – probably a good idea to make sure that I show those differences clearly!

Similar species: White-capped and Chatham Island mollymawks are close relatives, but all are separated by the degree of grey on the head and the bill colour. White-capped mollymawk has a white head and neck, with a small black patch in front of the eyes and a grey wash on the cheeks. Its bill has grey-blue sides with yellowish top, bottom and tip. Chatham Island mollymawk is the darkest-faced of the three and has a bright yellow bill with a dark spot near the tip of the lower mandible. Juveniles of Buller’s and Salvin’s mollymawks are very similar, but both species fly across the Pacific Ocean to seas off Chile and Peru as soon as they fledge. Juvenile Buller’s mollymawks are smaller and slimmer, with less robust bills.
Source:
NZ birds online

Looks like the white-capped mollymawk is the bottom of the two birds in that photo, then!

​Albatrosses belong to the Procellariiformes, or petrels, a distinctive group of marine birds readily identified by their nostrils being sheathed in prominent horny tubes arising near the base of the bill. Other features of petrels are the hooked beak tip, long legs, webbed feet for swimming, and a thick coat of feathers with insulation usually augmented by a layer of fat below the skin. Like other seabirds they swallow salt water when feeding, so they have a salt gland above each eye. This removes excess salt from their bloodstream. The salty solution then drains from the tubes along their bill.
Source:
​Te Ara

Well, that’s fascinating! I wondered what those weird nostrils were on the beaks of some of the birds that I have already drawn! And yes, they were petrels!

Right, but the albatrosses don’t seem to have those lumpy beaks…

[Petrels] have nasal passages that attach to the upper bill called naricorns, although the nostrils on the albatross are on the sides of the bill. 
Source:
​TERRAIN

Ok, great, that makes sense. Time to start drawing!

​A medium-sized albatross with pale grey head, throat and nape, black across the upperwings, white lower back and rump, black-tipped white tail, and a grey-green bill with paler top and bottom and a black spot at the tip of the lower bill. Adults have white underparts, narrow black borders under the wing, and a small black notch in the “armpit” at the base of the leading edge of the wing.
Source:
NZ birds online

How amazingly huge these birds are! Their wingspan is around a metre, and they weigh between ​3.4 – 4.4 kg – about the same as a pet cat.

I have drawn quite a few seabirds now, and it’s definitely getting easier. 

And now it’s time to colour it all in! The feet were a bit of a challenge, though, as they seem to be a different colour in each picture, and they’re not described in any of the text I can find. Oh well, we’re going with the colour of the baby feet.

All finished!

The former range of shore plover is poorly known. They were first sighted in Dusky and Queen Charlotte Sounds on Cook’s second voyage, and at mudflats and sandspits around the North Island in the early 1800s. 

By the 1870s. cats and Norways rats caused the shore plover to vanish from mainland coasts.

For more than 100 years, Rangatira in the Chatham Islands had the only known population of around 120 birds. The current (2017) wild population is around 240 birds, more than half of which are in the Chatham Islands.

Today, Auckland’s Motutapu Island is the easiest place to see shore plover.

They are also found on Rangatira and Mangere Islands in the Chatham Islands, and Waikawa Island in Hawke’s Bay – all of which have restricted access.
Source:
DOC

They all seem to look faintly offended, like those awkward photographic portraits, back when people had to try to stay very still.

​A small stocky plover that is brown above and white below with a distinctive black (male) or dark-brown (female) face mask extending down the neck and throat, a bold white stripe above the eyes, a grey-brown crown mottled with darker brown, and white underparts. The relatively long pointed orange bill has a dark tip, the eye-rings are orange-red and the legs are orange.
Source:
NZ birds online

So I sketched a few ideas from my research, and began to work.

This was another design that required its own colour scheme, so I made another range of colour references.​

And we’re all ready to roll!

While both DOC and NZ birds online refer to the South Georgian diving petrel, Wikipedia differentiates between the South Georgian species and a new species, the Whenua Hou diving petrel.

​A somewhat dense academic document explains the difference:

Differences in breeding habitat and results from a preliminary molecular analysis indicated that the New Zealand population of the South Georgian Diving Petrel (Pelecanoides georgicus) was a distinct, yet undescribed, species.
[…]
Results show that individuals from New Zealand differ significantly from P. georgicus from all other populations as following: 1) longer wings, 2) longer outer tail feathers, 3) deeper bills, 4) longer heads, 5) longer tarsi, 6) limited collar extent, 7) greater extent of contrasting scapulars, 8) larger contrasting markings on the secondaries, 9) paler ear coverts, 10) paler collars, and 11) paler flanks. 
Source:
PLoS One

By referring to that article, I can clearly see that these two photos show the correct bird, simply by looking at the white markings on the wings. Most of the other differences require other birds for comparison. The markings are going to be pretty important in the colouring phase of this drawing.

Codfish Island or Whenua Hou is a small island (14 km2 or 5.4 sq mi) located to the west of Stewart Island/Rakiura in southern New Zealand. It reaches a height of 250 m (820 ft) close to the south coast.

The English name “Codfish Island” refers to the endemic blue cod or rawaru / pakirikiri, which is fished commercially in surrounding waters by trapping in baited pots. The Māori-language name “Whenua Hou” means “new land”. Codfish Island is home to Sirocco, an internationally famous kakapo, a rare species of parrot.

​The sole remaining breeding ground in New Zealand is on Codfish Island, near Stewart Island. The birds formerly nested on Enderby and Dundas Islands at the Auckland Islands. Subfossil bones indicate they previously nested on Stewart Island and possibly on Chatham and Macquarie Islands. […]
On Codfish Island the birds nest in sand dunes behind Sealers Bay. Some nests are at the base of dunes at the back of the beach whereas others are amongst native or introduced coastal dune vegetation on the dune slopes.
​All nests are within 100 m of the sea. Nest sites are in very unstable sand and it is nearly impossible to access the nests without destroying these sites.

My first observations are that this bird looks a great deal like a couple of the other petrels that I have drawn recently, particularly the tāiko (the bird, not the drum), although it’s a much larger bird than this one. I can also see a much shorter tail, and different-coloured feet.

The weather here is really odd – it’s very hard to concentrate and settle down to focus correctly on drawing. 
​I’m going to give it my best shot. 

In these pictures, I am referring to the clearest pictures I can find of beak contours and head/neck colouring.

My initial quick outlines need considerable rework – I want to be sure that I am representing a recognisable, if stylised, Whenua Hou diving petrel.

Because there are so few pictures of the actual birds just being birds, I have used reference photos of other South Georgian petrels for my outline sketches, and then I add in the colouration that identifies the correct type of bird. That’s why you can see different stippling patterns on the belly in the draft, which then disappear in the final.

I use bright green to help me identify the white areas that are left to colour, as these become transparent when I create a repeat – so if the background colour is purple, for example, all of these areas will also be purple. 

And here they are, fully coloured! As with all my designs, once they are completed, the colours may change to ensure a more consistent overall effect, which is why I make sure that I capture all of the variants in each picture.

​The New Zealand dotterel is a familiar bird of sandy east coast beaches in the northern North Island, but is sparsely distributed around much of the rest of the country. There are two widely separated subspecies: the northern New Zealand dotterel is more numerous, and breeds around the North Island; the southern New Zealand dotterel was formerly widespread in the South Island, and now breeds only on Stewart Island. Southern New Zealand dotterels are larger, heavier, and darker than northern New Zealand dotterels.
Source:
NZ birds online

There are major differences in breeding habitat between the two subspecies. Northern birds mainly breed on sandy beaches and sandspits, some on shell banks in harbours, a few on gravel beaches. On beaches, they are usually clustered around stream-mouths. In urban areas (particularly Auckland) they often breed a short distance inland on short grass (golf courses, motorway verges, beside airport runways) or on bare ground (building sites, quarries). Southern birds breed on exposed subalpine herbfields and rocky areas above the tree-line on Stewart Island, but are coastal during the non-breeding season, feeding on inter-tidal mudflats and beaches.
Source:
NZ birds online

Plovers (/ˈplʌvər/ or /ˈploʊvər/) are a widely distributed group of wading birds belonging to the subfamily Charadriinae.

There are about 66 species in the subfamily, most of them called “plover” or “dotterel”. 

Plovers are found throughout the world, with the exception of the Sahara and the polar regions, and are characterised by relatively short bills. They hunt by sight, rather than by feel as longer-billed waders like snipes do. They feed mainly on insects, worms or other invertebrates, depending on the habitat, which are obtained by a run-and-pause technique, rather than the steady probing of some other wader groups.

Plovers engage in false brooding, a type of distraction display. Examples include: pretending to change position or to sit on an imaginary nest site.

A group of plovers may be referred to as a stand, wing, or congregation. A group of dotterels may be referred to as a trip.
Source:
Wikipedia

The New Zealand plover (Charadrius obscurus) is a species of shorebird found only in certain areas of New Zealand. Its Māori names include tūturiwhatu, pukunui, and kūkuruatu.
[…]
Other common names for the New Zealand plover include the red-breasted dotterel and the New Zealand dotterel.
Source:
Wikipedia

Structurally, they seem very similar, certainly at the level of detail that I will be showing in my drawings. 
They do have different colouring, though.

​A bulky plover with a heavy black bill, relatively long grey legs and large round dark eyes. 
​The upperparts are brown, darker in the southern subspecies, and the underparts are off-white in autumn-early winter, becoming orange-red (also darker in southern birds) from about May onwards. The depth and extent of red colour varies individually and seasonally, but males are generally darker than females. The bill is heavy and black, and the legs mid-grey. First-winter birds have pure white underparts, with legs yellowish to pale grey.
Source:
NZ Birds online

As usual, I capture my palette and use green to identify the uncoloured areas.

And it’s all done!