A MALVERN artist is lending her talents to saving a rare zebra which is facing extinction in Africa.

The Grevy's zebra is the fastest-declining land mammal in Kenya, and the Hampshire-based conservation charity Marwell Wildlife has launched an initiative to save it with the mass art project Marwell’s Zany Zebras.

And Rachel Blackwell is one of the artists whose work has been selected from hundreds of others for the trail.

She chose to illustrate her zebra with an evocation of a British summer landscape, in a swirling design reminiscent of a zebra’s stripes.

She has named the sculpture Swirly Whirly and its quirky design features mushroom houses, button flowers, bumblebees and fairies floating on dandelion seeds.

The finished work will be on show in Southampton for ten weeks this summer, when the city becomes home to a herd of colourful zebra sculptures. She also created a miniature version which will be placed at Marwell Zoo, near Winchester.

She said: “I was delighted to be chosen for this exciting project. I picked up the blank zebra from Marwell zoo intending to paint it in my home studio; however, as the almost life-size zebra sculpture wouldn’t fit in the room, I had to paint it in my kitchen.

"It was quite surreal having a huge zebra in my kitchen during the painting part of the project.

"It took around 11 days to paint, which works out at about 60 to 70 hours from start to finish. As part of the project was to paint a miniature zebra, it was an interesting challenge switching from painting on a large scale to painting on such a tiny scale immediately afterwards. During the project I made a time-lapse video of the painting process, giving an interesting insight into how my paintings are made.”

Rachel graduated from Worcester University with a degree in fine art practice in 2011. Since then she has exhibited her work nationally at galleries in London, Birmingham, Exeter, Malvern and Worcester, and recently painted a large-scale mural in the children’s section of Malvern Library.

She said: “I have always been interested in the welfare of animals. When I read about the plight of the Grevy’s zebra I felt that by participating in this project I could help to raise awareness and funds for these beautiful creatures.”