This iPad drawing of the Snake’s Dead Fritillary, was achieved by using the layers in Fresco to achieve a sense of depth and to enable texturing techniques that would be difficult to achieve using other mediums. Other new effects were found through experimentation to avoid creating a painting that would resemble photo realism. Again, layers are used to create the illusion of a light source and depth and there is a nice counterpoint between the colours magenta and greens.

Snake’s Head Fritillaries; background information from Herefordshire Wildlife Trust

 Snake’s head fritillaries are a spectacular species of plant. Once a common sight on flood meadows, they are now mostly confined to a few sites in southern and eastern England and the eastern Midlands river valleys. The fritillaries on Lugg Meadows are unusual as there is a mixture of both white and the more usual mauve fritillaries and they appear in swathes rather than clumps, tending to grow along old water runnels where it is damper. The fritillaries are currently doing well in the reserve, with numbers now over 1,500, and the population slowly spreading.

Upper & Lower Lugg meadows are unique, being living survivors of a land tenure and farming economy system that has disappeared elsewhere. Dating back to the time before the Domesday Book, Lugg Meadow is one of the most important surviving Lammas Meadow (common meadows opened for communal grazing on Lammas Day, the 1st August) in the UK. Ownership of the meadow is still divided, though in medieval times this would have been between dozens of owners with the land doled out in strips, today these have become amalgamated and a handful of different owners own largish parcels of the land.

Over 20 grass species are recorded here as well as a variety of herbaceous plants. Alongside the snake’s head fritillary grows nationally scarce narrow-leaved water dropwort.