Salaric

I tend to make, paint and sew seascapes for me, my husband and my little girl. The history of this is to do with my undergraduate degree, a paleobiology module and me explaining colonial organisms to my husband. The particular organism I was taken with is called Bryozoa but I got it a bit mixed up with corals. Anyway my husband and I decided we were a ‘colony’ and I started producing pictures of the colony within an ocean bottom environment.

This is the latest and it was my Valentine’s card to him this year.

I got the card blank from a set of eight card blanks and card toppers from the Pound Shop and the rest, ie the picture, is all cut out of magizines and catalogues. They are stuck on using glue sticks.

I cut the shapes out including:

• Seaweed

• A rock

• Colonial organism like a coral coming out of its tube

• Fish

• Heart

I tend to sit down and chop up a page at a time of magazines into the shapes the colours and layout that the page suggests to me. So for the shapes I eventually chose for this card I just selected from things I’d already cut out.

I wanted a very clean and stylised look.

I started gluing the shapes on, first off the seaweed and the fish hidden in them. I made sure that some of the seaweed overlapped the fish and some did not. This involved peeling up bits that had already been stuck and was essential for the balance of the picture. The rock in the middle was then stuck on.

I then placed the coral onto the rock, making sure that the bottom of the coral overlapped the rock. I then placed on the fish in the background and the blue heart – the heart was purely to show it was a card for Valentine’s day.