my own marks on paper ready to be incorporated into print Chine-collé (pronounced shin-kol-ay) roughly translates from French as 'China glued' Chine: The French word for China, which refers to the tissue-thin, delicate papers traditionally imported from Asia (China, Japan, and India) for printmaking. collé- stuck or glued. I came to discover chine collé on a collagraph course at the Hub, the National Centre for Craft and Design in Sleaford, Lincolnshire. I was there with two friends and Andy,...

, Bluebells & Stitchwort bluebells & hares running wild April keeps you guessing, and this year more than most. The sky has been doing extraordinary things — long stretches of a washed, particular blue that makes the fields and hedges beneath it look almost theatrical in their greenness, and then without much warning a charcoal cloud-mass, noisily rolling in and turning everything underneath it an unnerving lilac, long before the heavy rain even arrives. It shakes the cherry blossom however...

Blankney snowdrops snowdrops & places to go The cold comes up through your jeans, the smell of the leaf litter fills your nose — dark and sweet and ancient, faintly mushroomy but not unpleasant, the quiet proof that the ground has been working away beneath the frost all along. Old bark and decomposing leaves lie right there in front of the lens, all russet and amber, last year's colours. While just beyond them snowdrops stand clean and white and entirely new. Looking through the viewfinder...