Art and Nature

This is Claire, she's a student at Edinburgh Art College and she's next to one of her own designs...

Back in October I helped to arrange for a bunch of fashion, textiles and costume students to come to visit our entomology store at work. They chatted to the curator, sketched, photographed and generally studied the butterflies, moths, beetles, and bugs in the collection. The exhibition at the Art College today was displaying the work they produced that was inspired by the collection.

I was really impressed with the designs and the colour and the detail in the work which was beautiful. Claire's design used hand painted flock applied to a silk background embellished by machine embroidery and crystals. The pattern was inspired by the vein patterns and segments of butterfly wings , and the texture of the flock mimics the rough slightly velvety feel of some of the larger beetles. I had a great time chatting to the budding artists and finding out about the techniques they used, makes me want to go back to college...

I'm going to right up a proper formal blog piece for work, but this seemed really blip worthy...