Imagine 200 school children demanding their photos be taken, decending on you like some crazy throng and posing in attitudes from their favourite gangsta rappers, like in the following photos.

Now imagine what it’s like for the shy girl who’d love to have her photograph taken but simply can’t or won’t push her way to the front because of all these extroverts.

What happens when the photographer (me) sees this shy girl hanging back but desperately wanting a piece of the action?

I’m in a tiny outback town that I’ve written about many times before, Spitzkoppe in Namibia, and I’m at the local primary school being beseiged by all these kids, the boys adopting aggressive poses that they think look cool because they’ve seen them on telly, and the girls all posing like supermodels (and some of them are more beautiful than some real supermodels). I see one small shy girl hanging back, unlike all the others, and I go over to her and ask if she would like her photo taken. Her face beams and I take some shots and then show them to her on the back of the camera. She loves them and laughs, but then still shows her shy side and I manage to get one final shot of her showing her true colours.

This scratchboard piece is the result of that encounter and I’ve called it “Demure Joy”, symbolising both reactions I saw from her that day.

This is a small scratchboard, 8″ x 10″ and something different from me. It’s a rooster that I saw wandering around the Adelaide Zoo looking very sure of himself. I’ve used acrylics and watercolours to colour it with. The wattle and comb were fun as I’d never done anything quite like them before. My wife wants to get chickens for our vegie garden so maybe one day I’ll have some of these of my own to work directly from. Mind you, I think I can do without the 5am alarm call that I’m sure this guy would regale us with.

I’m swapping art again. I have done the following two scratchboards, a tiger called “The Big Stretch” and a Bighorn ram which I saw in Banff National Park on a visit there once. The tiger has been coloured with transparent inks and the ram is mixed media, the background coloured with oil paints and the ram with watercolours on top of the scratch. I now have to wait patiently for my two pieces to be finished and sent from the two different guys in the States. I’m amassing quite a collection of fine art from artists I’ve met on the net. Hopefully one day they’ll be insanely famous and I’ll be insanely rich by owning their work for free. In the meantime, here are my pieces.

The Big Stretch

Bighorn Sheep (Ram)

As a wildlife artist, one of my goals was to get to Etosha National Park in Namibia. It’s one of the most amazing places in the world and I managed to visit it last year. I broke my record for seeing the most number of elephants in one line of vision ever, thirty-three. I also saw a giraffe with a huge lion claw mark on its rump where it had escaped the clutches of a lion.

Of course I also saw just about every other animal under the sun too (excluding buffalo, hippo and crocs as the climate and subsequent lack of water doesn’t allow for them).

The town of Etosha is close by and there’s a group of Himba women who hang around trying to make money from tourists by getting them to take their pictures. Of course, they are all so amazing looking that you can’t help but pay up and click away. I negotiated hard with the girl who seemed to be designated to handle the financial transactions. She was about 16 years old and quite the negotiator. I thought I did well but when I handed over the small amount of money (in western terms) she insisted I took a photo of her holding the money up. I think they were quite pleased with the amount, and this was confirmed when another one took my hand and wouldn’t stop kissing it. Of course, I made good use and snapped away for quite a while getting a very good selection of photographs. And I’ll bet not many South Australians can say that their hands have been kissed by Himba maidens!!

So what’s so special about the Himba? Well, they never bathe. They cover their bodies with a mixture of fat, red ochre mud and the resin of the Omuzumba shrub , and they also pack this mud on and in their hair. The resulting red colour symbolises their connection with the earth and also blood of new life. The added benefit is that they are more protected from a very hot sun.

The women don’t wear clothing from the waist up (neither do them men) and this coupled with the red colour makes them quite a sight and an obvious target for an artist. This is a scratchboard I did of one of them, coloured with inks, coloured pencils and oil paints.