For my daughter's birthday, she chose 5 of the small Floressence paintings and I had them framed in a close fitting box frame.

I decided to divide the painting into 3 strips, and fold each into 4 pieces, join them and thus make a 12 page concertina. To make covers I folded the first and last pages back on themselves and glued them down. It needed something to make it purposeful, so I hand wrote words, a quote from Wordsworth, around some of the shapes. The lettering still needs work - it was harder than I expected to make it look fluent - but the idea is coming together.

Having never used acrylic paint, was given a few tubes so decided to try them out. I mixed some bright colours and thinned them down to the consistency of ink, then painted on rough watercolour paper, making small strokes with a fine paintbrush to build up patterns and textures. The image - as usual - was based loosely on flower forms. The next stage will be to cut the painting into three or four strips and rejoin them and fold to make a concertina book.

As I have become very concerned about the lightfastness of coloured pencils I decided to try using pastel pencils, which apparently are lightfast. The colours are wonderfully rich and can be overlaid for depth of colour, and using a stump I can work into areas to get a range of tones. The main drawback is that they are impossible to sharpen to a sharp point, so edges have to be softer than I would like. This drawing is an experiment - I'm not sure it works with these images standing on a white background, so I might end up working into the background - I will keep thinking about it for now!

 I decided to continue working the large pen and ink orchid drawing, feeling that leaving it black and white was a bit insipid, so added colour in several ways - first coloured pencil, then thin acrylic washes. now I think the background is a bit too heavy, but it has given more dimension to the overall piece.

This drawing was entered into the Australian Society of Miniature Art Annual Awards (along with another drawing, an etching and a concertina book) and received a Highly Commended. The judge's comment was that it was a 'very disturbing' drawing. I think he got it spot on!

A friend who produces incredibly detailed delicate miniatures showed me a technique she uses to produce 'found' drawings or, in her case, paintings. It involves the use of very dilute Liquid Pencil dropped randomly into pooled water on good quality watercolour paper. This is then firmly covered with scrunched up cling film, pressed down and left to dry. The resultant 'blob' is then worked into and unexpected images result. I worked into this with pencil, enhancing interesting marks until the head wrapped in a shawl emerged. For a detailed tutorial go to

www.asma-nsw.com/the_blot_9.html

I started this painting over a year ago, and left it to one side as I felt the structure was wrong - it had just the two large flower forms, which left a large hole in the middle. I was happy with the richness of the colours so didn't want to overpaint the whole thing. Working with the small flowers from WA reinterested me in this painting, and I let my imagination go, bringing in strange cloudy shapes and feel it is now unified - it has a strange, underwater sense to it now and I am happy with the result.

It is 20 cm x 20 cm and is part of the ongoing Floressence series. All the works are square and range in size from 10 cm x 10 cm (which is the majority) 20 cm x 20 cm, 30 cm x 30 cm and 60 cm x 60 cm.

This drawing is quite large (for me, anyway) 56 cm square, drawn with dots using a .3 pen mostly, but a .5 pen for the denser areas of tone. Quite time-consuming. It is based on a tiny orchid, the actual flower being only about 2 cm across.

 Photos and drawings of the WA wildflowers have inspired a new series of paintings. The first one, based on a tiny, delicate ant orchid has developed through a number of changes of direction - I wasn't satisfied with the result when it first seemed to be finished, it was too heavy and slick. By working into the background, adding more texture and softer colours helped but it still wasn't right, so I scraped the surface back, rubbed it with solvent to soften it further, then reworked some parts.