I collect spores, moulds and fungus

Don't you?! Spores are amazing, here's why.

Fine, I don’t actually collect any of those things, but I couldn’t resist a Ghostbusters reference.

The first print in our Underground Kingdom series was Spores. A deep, dark, magical-feeling background with little bright pops of life growing down the length of the print. And Adam’s lovely text,

Tumbling softly through the wind
A tiny ball of life
Not an egg
Not a seed
Something else

Spores have been found in microfossils from 450 million years ago, so they’ve had time to get really good at what they do, and I like anything that takes time to hone a skill. While several living things use spores to reproduce, at present I’ve only got eyes for fungal spores. A single mushroom can produce a billion spores. They release them through gills (in the right conditions you might even see spores wafting into the air through those ridged bits of some mushrooms), or puff them into the air when hit, some even have little bags of liquid with the spores in and when ripe, they expel the spores with the kind of force that is a bit stupid, if we’re honest.

For this print I wanted to capture the feeling of volume I have come to associate with spores. Like an entire universe of tiny stars, floating against the forest… but also showing the contents of a single spore - capable of making a whole new fungus. Well, sort of. Fungal spores grow these thread-like strands called hyphae, often only a cell thick. Hundreds of thousands of strands of hyphae grow together to form a furry-looking mat of threads, called mycelium.

But that’s a whole other print so you’re going to have to come back for that one.