Discovering The Woods

After thinking it over in my mind I think I've concentrated my ideas down to a simplified eco system, and something I can work into the Mandala.

Firstly I ventured a bit further into the library jungle, and came out equipped with:
Animal Psychology, R. H. Smythe. circa 1961
and

The Pictorial Encyclopedia of the Animal Kingdom, V. J. Stanek. circa 1962

both books complete with old school due date stamps and little yellow slips in jackets!

So I was thinking about the amount of deers featured in my blog already and I can't leave them out of the Mandala. How about other woodland creatures, you know the cute and cliché North American 'the woods' kind of forest, with bears and racoons and owls and foxes and wolves and DEERS! All the things that arent native Australian animals, because how non-exotic is that?

So, some ideas:

centre: sun? microscopic cells? - the building blocks of life and the ecosystem. tree?

four sides: animals-deer, bear, owl, fox?
I can also fuse images of cells and micro-organisms with images of nature, or use these to create background patterns and details.

All the while remembering to use my illustrator skills, so aiming for a vector/paint by numbers style -linking back to Shauna's paintings as seen in the video tour.