I've been working on the Butterfly Queen painting today, in watercolour which I build up in glazes...it's coming along. For a break and some fresh air I dug up another panful of tatties from amongst the seeding wildflowers. I had not expected any crop this year as the plants did not grow well during this wet summer and died back too soon, but there are a few in there and they taste much nicer than the shop-bought ones.

 On the subject of gardening, let me introduce you to Edgar Noddle, Gnome, head of my garden gnomes. Edgar has made a few posts of his own on the subject of Goode Gnome Gardeninge in my other website Blog ( www.suzannegyseman.co.uk ) but has found that his duties overseeing the other garden gnomes take up most of his time... though a formerly shy creature, since discovering cyber-space he has developed a taste for posting on Blogs and wanted to make an appearance here to say "Helloe".

Sunshine has brought out a few late butterflies in the garden. Here's a pic of one of my favourites, the Painted Lady... this photo is from last summer which was excellent for butterflies weighing down the buddleias - I didn't photograph any this summer as it rained such a lot and was not so good for butterflies. The weather was not so good for my tattie patch either...the potato plants dropped all their leaves with all the rain, so I let the wildflowers take over - poppies, foxgloves, marigolds and others - at least it looked pretty and the insects liked it! I just had a quick dig to see if any potatoes happened to be lurking in there and found one and a half so far...well, that's one and a half organically grown fresh spuds for tea!

 Looking through my stack of unfinished paintings and sketches (I tend to work on several at a time) I've decided to try to complete one of a Butterfly Woman I started over a year ago. Here's the drawing of her - well, the centre of the drawing as the whole is too large to fit in my scanner.

I've completed the Greenman image I was working on - this was an experiment with ink and oil-pastel resist technique....then the mistakes covered over with more oil pastel, more ink....! It's quite a fun technique using oil pastel as an underlay covered with an ink layer, allowed to dry, then scrape into it revealing the coloured underlayer. You can get interesting effects where the ink has partially soaked through the oil pastel layer into the paper.

Oh, and I've also added a photo of me to My Photos :) My hair went "silver" young....;)

It's coffee-break here ...it's raining today so I won't be tempted to potter outside - will get down to some work at my easel! The goldfinches are in the birches again, feeding on the catkins, and I've put fresh seed in the bird-feeder for the sparrows, chaffinches and bluetits (a pretty pagoda styled one which looks great with birds hopping in and out). Have you ever noticed that when you put mixed seed out for them they first eat all the yummy sunflower seeds leaving the more ordinary grain till another day....I used to use one of those seed-feeder tubes but they would systematically throw out all the grain to get to the sunflower seeds!

Paintings: I've recently completed a book-cover commission with a dragon theme and am awaiting the publisher's approval (nail-biting time)...Now I'm working on a Greenman/Cernunnos image based on my pencil sketch "Eyes of the Forest" (in my photo gallery). This was inspired by a presence sensed in the green shadow-light in a beautiful forest nearby...I've seen roe deer picking their way across the mossy hummocks among the tall pines,  Speckled-wood butterflies spiralling up the sunrays which slant between the trees on sunny days, heard all sorts of bird-calls from high up in the treetops, found badger tracks in the damp earth...I love finding the animal-tracks that weave through the forest, traces of the secret nocturnal creatures that live there.

The gold tints of autumn in the birches of my garden also means that berries and seed heads are ripe...I was just making my breakfast cup of tea gazing out the kitchen window at the trees and saw movement in one of the birches where small birds were also gathering their breakfast. I keep binoculars next to the window and through these I was able to view a group of beautifull goldfinches in the tree. I counted six of them, at least two of which are slightly-fluffy fledgelings. I wondered what they were eating - and saw that they were taking seeds from the birch catkins. This was a new realisation to me, I know they are seed-eaters but have only previously seen them on thistle-heads and dandelions.