When we were in the Philippines we spent a few days on the beach and I managed to get a good haul of lovely shells and dead coral. I'm going to give them away as presents but in the meantime I have two big jars of them on my desk. So i've turned some of them into fabric prints.
The turtle was an idea i got from a Japanese story that my band Halo Halo have written a song about. Its one of the earliest tales about time travel, we're into things like that. The story is a about a fisherman named Urashima Taro who rescues a turtle and is then taken under the ocean to meet the turtles father. The turtle turns out to be a Princess of the sea called Otohime. She gives him a wooden box as a gift and tells him that it will keep him safe but that he must never open it. After a few days he decides he needs to go back to see his ailing mother but when he returns to land everything has changed and his mother is gone. He asks someone if they recall a fisherman called Urashima Taro but he is told that there was a fisherman of that name but that he had disappeared many years before. In shock he opens the wooden box and a cloud of white smoke bursts out. All of a sudden he is very old, with a bent back and a long white beard. He hears the princess' voice whisper to him, "I told you not to open that box for in it was your old age"!
So Voila! A turtle with a castle on its back. I think I'm going to do more pictures for that story so back to work!
