That Easter moves around March and April and causes significant scheduling difficulties for anyone involved in education and/or work with children is down to a bunch of men sitting down in a place called Nicaea in 325 and a hundred years of subsequent theological argument. Following which, the best they could come up with was to peg the date to the phases of the moon. WTF?

Anyway, this Easter has brought me back to eggs in a big way. I’ve been painting on the inside and outside of hens eggs for the last six months or so. I’m dying to get my hands on some goose eggs, and our local butcher has been trying to get them for me but hasn’t had any success so far. Goose eggs are obviously bigger, are stronger, and can therefore withstand more decorative punishment, so to speak.

Flying Tiger eggs are a bit of a life saver, though, to be honest. They are a bit bigger than hens’ eggs, are wooden and, therefore indestructible. Cheap too at €2!

This evening, I spent a mindful couple if hours listening to Tibetan bowls on YouTube and starting a bit of work on five eggs: one hen’s egg and four Flying Tiger ones. This is work in progress. I ran out of steam eventually and stopped before I started making mistakes.

Here they are …

I’m going to have another go at drawing a mandala on the black one. My previous effort at this failed because the white pen didn’t run on black acrylic paint. This time I’ve used black gouache. You can see I’ve drawn a small circle on the top so I think the pen will work OK this time.

There’s a faint pencil mark on the hen’s egg to the front, as a guide for a simple design. Not sure what I’ll do with the other white one. The two at the back are going to be floral.

I’m quite pleased with the sky effect so far. And here’s a close-up of progress on the undergrowth at the bottom of it.

There’s a significant tradition of decorating eggs in the Ukraine by the way. The decorated eggs are called Pysanka and the method used is similar to that for batik, with wax used to inhibit paint or dye from staining parts of the egg in turn while other parts are decorated.