Posts

I am not too fussy about watercolour paper, since when you paint on nautical charts, the paper quality is atrocious and I tend to use a transparent surface primer to make it halfway acceptable. For sketchbooks, I’ll often pick up something from Hahnemühler, so I was interested to see their new line of papers with a more sustainable selection of fibres than the typical water-hungry cotton. I picked up a tiny 8×10.5cm pad of Agave… Read more: Paper Review: Hahnemühle Agave

The white continent is looking distinctly green around the gills. Or at least around the edges, according to a new study published in Nature Geoscience. It’s easy to think of Antarctica as a polar desert, devoid of plant life and uninteresting to the botanist. That’s true for its vast plateau of ice (snow algae aside), but at its margins Antarctica is host to a few extreme photosynthesizers. Mosses and lichens are best represented, being able… Read more: Antarctic Greening

Autumn is in the air – a thin crust of frazil ice is reforming in the Arctic waters where I work in summer, and October is just around the corner. Last Autumn I took on Inktober for the first time. Having watched from the sidelines for a couple of years, I finally plucked up the courage to give it a go myself in 2023. It came at a great time for me, when life was… Read more: Inktober 2023