Recently I attended an art street show in San Clemente, CA.  One of the booths had ROCKS!  I spent some time digging through the different pans and boxes of stones.  I found some wonderful stones for future art canvases.  I met Gary and Sheila who own Designs By Nature; a mineral store in town.  It is always fun to talk with other people who love stones as much as I do. Usually I pick stones that are interesting and just feel right when I pick stones to add to canvas.  I found the pan that held fossils full of interesting artistic opportunities.  Fortunately for me Sheila and Gary knew the histories of the stones I liked.  I ended up buying a fossil I knew nothing about.  Sheila informed me that it was full of crinoid plants.  Crinoids are often called Sea Lilies.  They resembled flowers but they were not plants.  They had lots of feathery arms that form what looked like a flower.  The feathery arms opened and closed like a flower as it looked for food in the swaying ocean current.  The flower part was at the end of a long stem-looking part of the animal.  They are relatives of starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, and brittle stars.  Crinoids are echinoderms, animals with rough, spiny surfaces.  They lived in the ocean roughly 490 million years ago.
After researching crinoids at home I decided to do a painting that was just the curled up feathery arms.  The painting above is the beginning of the feathery arms.  The fossil will be in the right lower corner of the painting eventually.  There will also be other stones in the painting to bring it all together.  The feathery arms will be done in yellow, black and white.  I love being inspired by fossils and gem stones.  They bring another depth to my use of stones on canvas.