Dr Shirley Sherwood asked me to paint on a piece of the Rory McEwen vellum for the exhibition "The McEwen Legacy: Artists Influenced by Rory McEwen" at Kew Gardens, England in 2013. This exhibition was hung alongside the astonishing Retrospective of Rory McEwen's own work "The Colours of Reality". I began the painting while I was Artist in Residence at the State Library of NSW. My first effort on the McEwen vellum failed, as the surface developed foxing once it was exposed to the light. I did not discover this until I had completed the painting, as I had masked the vellum so only the image area to be painted was exposed until the end. I show it here, as the work itself was a success despite the failure of the support that it was painted on.