I was flicking through a folder of pictures I had torn from magazines, looking for ideas, when I stopped at the cover of a magazine called Pure. It was a short-lived London magazine, which I had gone to see and was given a copy.

Months later in a clear out, I tore off the cover and threw the rest away. I liked the way the light was hitting the model’s face from a spotlight placed high above her. Four years later, I stopped to contemplate the picture again. The shadows underneath the eyes, vaguely brought to mind the wings of butterflies. Shortly before that I had finished a project using cut-outs and other things to form shadows of faces of women. It struck me I could perhaps do the same thing with the cut-outs of butterfly wings. I went off to the library to find a book on butterflies.

There are three libraries in my local area and I have found ideas for pictures in all of them. My favourite section is the hobby and craft section. There I have found books on making frames, wire jewellery, decoupage, bread dough sculptures and other topics. They have led me to ideas for photographs or decoration for my flat. I found a good book and I scanned illustrations from it, printed them out and cut them out in the shape of the shadows of the facial features, taped them to standing wire, threw a light on them and another project was born. I then decided it would be useful to have more examples of the insects and scanned extra and painstakingly cut them out.

Further into the same folder, I came across a picture of another woman and decided to use the shadows from that as well. Shortly before all this, I serendipitously discovered I could project shadows by lying something on a mirror and bouncing a light off it. I decided to use this technique as well.