During my first year at Uni, we had a project that everyone had to do called The London Project.
For this project, we went on a walk and draw from Holborn to the Tate Modern along the Southbank and on this journey we had to find something that inspired us. My favourite thing that I saw on my journey was a squirrel, so I decided to do a project about attracting more squirrels to the Thames. I ended up making some biodegradable feeders from citrus fruits and used cotton string to hang them up. I decided that I wanted them to be bright and colourful, which is why I chose citrus fruits. As well as it had to be biodegradable because I didn't want to harm the environment.
Once they were made, I decided to test out these feeders and I knew that St James Park has a variety of wildlife. It seemed to work well and lets just say I made lots of animals friends that day because I was the food lady.
For the final piece, I made a poster with a photo of the feeders, but truthfully it wasn't very good. However recently I was thinking about revisiting some projects and I really liked those feeders that i made and I felt that I could do more with the project. So I decided to turn this project into attracting more wildlife into our gardens because it's a good way to teach children about wildlife and I just quite enjoy watching wildlife visiting my garden.
Therefore I decided to make a little fold out leaflet, which teaches you how to make the biodegradable feeders and illustrated the instructions, so that it's simple enough to create and could even be a project to do with children. I decided to separate it into eight sections, so when you fold it up, each section has a single instruction. Below is a picture of my instructions.
Then I coloured them in with watercolours to make them colourful and enjoyable to look at.
The picture on the left has a plain background and on the right, I decided to try a dotted coloured background, which I ended up quite liking.
So one side was done, but on the other side was blank, so I decided to create an illustration showing the feeders with imaginary animals coming to visit. My illustration started from a photo that I took of the three feeders that I made.
As I coloured the instructions in with watercolours, I thought it would be best to do the other side as well.
My next step after that was to draw some animals to go into my illustration. I decided on a blackbird, a squirrel and a wood pigeon because they are all animals that you may find visiting your garden.
Then I added the animals to my illustrations and decided to colour in my background, which I thought turned out quite nicely, but I felt that the feeders needed some colour. However I decided to keep the animals in black and white because I wanted it to look as though, only with the feeders can you attract these animals to your garden.
I ended up colouring the feeders in bright colours because I wanted them to be eye catching as they are the main focus of the piece.
Once everything was done, I tested it out and ended up printing it out on 160gsm card because I wanted it be durable.
For more images of the final piece please visit:
http://miss-pang.com/Attracting-Wildlife
