Abubilla Music

Tip of the Day: Keep track of your fly!

Written by Jimmy

Now, this isn’t really an Easter topic, but it is important. It’s some advice about Dead Fly Art.

By far our most popular blog was ‘What To Do When You’re Bored at Work’ .  It was posted by Lou, and discovered on the web by Lou’s Mum.    So, we’re in Spain over Easter and the family decides to try to do one of these.  But, of course, there’s no How To Guide on dead fly art.   Well, we can write one now: 

1. Find fly.  Sounds easy, but in Spain there are lots of ants, lizards and birds that do a pretty good job of eating flies (more on this below).   Tory squished on in the bathroom, but was a bit gooshy for true art.   Finally I found a prestine fly on the floor of the laundry room.  Seemed quite fresh with ‘pretty wings.’   I’m not sure there’s anything really pretty about flies.
2. Get proportions right.  The fly art guy learned, far better than we did, to do very small little proportions.  Flies aren’t really that big.  So lots of failed drawing of flies with ridiculously big bunny ears to army boots.
3. Wind is your enemy.  As it is sunny, and as kathy bans playing with flies in house, we tried our dead fly art outside.  But there’s wind.  Paper and flies are quite, well, flyable.  And they fly away a lot. It is very hard to find a dead fly in the grass.  But we did.  Over and over again.
4. Ants are your real enemy.  After one photograph, we went back out to do some more drawings, only to discover that our fly was being packed off my a bunch of black ants.  They had pulled him all apart quite efficiently and we marching back to the base camp.  We only left our fly alone for a minute or two, but Mother Nature clearly decided to put an end to this humiliation and told the ants to put the fly to ‘better use.’   I don’t think it was her judgement of Dead Fly art per se, because that original fellow was left alone to render some beautful images.  I think it was a particular judgement about us.  Sad, but accurate.   We weren’t very good.    But we had very high hopes for scuba-diving fly, but unless our fortunes change, we’re not sure we’ll ever get to that…
5. Wash your hands after.   There’s not way to do dead fly art without touching a dead fly.  Oh you think you can move it around with a pencil, but you’re pulling the little guy from the grass, moving him about, postioning him left, right centre, upside down rightside up, whatever.  You get unusually close to a dead fly.    Closer than i ever imagined it would get to a fly.  All for art.

Oh well.  We did get one results.  Don’t judge us too harshly.  it was our first real try.

'Not 100% sure why he needs a parachute.'