After a fashion. My year/level group, to whom I showed the latest iteration of the Frog Fall book and asked for thoughts about the cover, unanimously said the frogs needed to be hand-painted and not digitally rendered. It was hard to disagree and so as today has been frog day and as I managed to spill glitter on them while they were wet, this is where we are.

Fortunately, because I apply paint, in effect, with a trowel, it was still wet when I took the photos and the result is astonishing. As if newly enamelled, every bit of the impasto texture shines and suggests a solidity that isn’t there. These are very raw; no tidying up or adjustment for shadows. And they’re from different angles so the light falls on them differently. I’m thinking this will add variety to the froggage in the book. The next step is to import them into Paintshop Pro and remove the background.

21st August. These frogs are a challenge to photograph – too distant and they go dark, close up and I lose the legs. So now I have a stack of near-identical frogs, frozen in flight, in my online storage facility. Some of them also now have transparent backgrounds so they’re ready to use in video. I’ll need to do this with the latest ones.

These are for illustration purposes only, and somewhere to hang wet frogs while they dry. It’s become a kind of diorama with a background (unfinished) painting and a number of 2D images hanging, literally, by a thread in the space under an impromptu hood. They keep escaping.

I don’t think my phone knows what to make of this visually chaotic scene; this is the best of a dismal bunch. These look remarkably 3D and still convincingly enammelised.

On a related note, the decline in UK frog species is becoming a worry (see https://www.froglife.org/2018/03/23/amphibian-and-reptile-declines-uk-perspective/) and due to the usual suspects – us. We build on their habitat, dry it up, leach away their water, and make ornamental rather than functional gardens. And as if that weren’t enough, some people have such a revulsion for them – not cute and furry, see? – that they make high-pitched screeching sounds at the sight, and keep their grass cut to billiard table standards. Add to that the loss of large numbers of insects globally (see https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2019/february/the-world-s-insect-populations-are-plummeting-everywhere-we-look.html) we’re also starving them to death.

Frog Fall began as a comedic story about the phenomenon of frogs falling from the skies and ends with the grim realisation that, if we don’t change our ways, there will soon be no frogs left.

Frog Fall, 2024. Written for the painting it accompanies here.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025