Spore prints and more fungus fun

As I described in an earlier post, last week was fungus week here at Lapaz Farm. We had a great time on our fungus hike and drew alot of the wonderful fungus we found. I had said that we would post some pictures of the spore prints we made, so finally here they are.
We decided to mix our spore prints amongst our drawings and I think it had a nice effect.
Here are Superboy’s drawings and spore prints.

He decided to “embellish” a little and add a fairy under his mushroom!
Here is a close-up of a spore print (please excuse the spelling error, I forgot to check his work!):

Here is mine:

We also noticed that some of the mushrooms had white spores, so we placed them on dark blue paper and they made lovely, ghostly spore prints. But when we sprayed on our “fixative” (we used cheap aerosol hairspray) it worked well on the dark prints, but made the white ones disappear. So, no pictures of those YET! (we are determined to try again). Reading in Comstock’s Handbook of Nature Study, I noticed that she recommends coating the paper with a thin layer of egg white BEFORE making the prints (duh!), to act as a fixative. Maybe we will try that next time! Anyway, reading Comstock’s also led us to do these drawings as a study of mushroom anatomy and form:

We had no idea about the interesting variations in mushroom form until we did this study. Not to mention the forms of other fungi-the stinkhorns, puffballs, shelf fungi, and others. It is like a whole new world within the natural world has opened up to us, and I can see this turning into another area of ongoing nature study, just like our ongoing observations of birds, flowers, and trees. I am so glad we took this week to focus on fungus.