More Botanicals.

With Melbourne being in the grip of a heat wave, the time normally spent working in the vegetable garden, has been spent playing with printing plants (botanicals) on my Gelatine plate. Here are a few more new images.

It's always tricky to decide when enough is enough! Too many layers and the print is a muddy mess, and too few layers and the print can appear too simple. Although there are three layers in the print above, I feel that there are too many open spaces. However, with the addition of a stamp or two that may not be the case.

                  This I feel is not successful! The grasses are too pale against the background.

While this print is fairly simple, I really like the colour and texture on some of the leaves. The blue on the leaves is left from a previous print and the paint was still wet.

Although fairly cluttered, I quite like this one, with some leaves appearing quite distinct and some appearing more complex.

Time for Printing Again.

 It seems a very long time since I posted anything here......in fact is IS a long time! Here we are in mid January 2025 and this is my first post for the year. I haven't been idle however, just snowed under with domesticity and a partner's ill health. It was lovely to get back to printing on a gelatine plate, inspired by  an online course that I enrolled in presented by Kim Herringe, a wonderful teacher and artist from Queensland. Her lessons are extremely well organised, very well delivered and very inspirational. Below are a few prints that I made last week following her lessons.

                                                 It was a good start to an other artistic year.

Full O' Fish.

This was the title that I gave my fabric fish bowl which has been in a recent exhibition called 'Vessel'

As the exhibition was to feature items using any form of printmaking, the fish are all printed from my hand carved rubber fish stamps. I had such fun making this fish bowl, but I have to admit that fitting the bottom to the sides was a bit tricky.

     This bowl is from a pattern in the book 'fast, fun & easy fabric vases' by Linda Johansen.

Birds of the Garden.

 I have just started on a series of bird prints, featuring the birds that I see in and around my home. Not long ago we very rarely saw magpies in the city, but these days there are dozens around on the various street nature strips. 

 The Red Wattle birds seem to have always been here in this corner of the city. They are very large nectar feeding birds, and they seem to have no idea that they are too big for some of the flower stems that they land on, resulting in lots of broken vegetation where they have been.

The very pretty little Wrens do not occur in the city garden, but are quite common in the garden of our bush cottage.

  All the backgrounds of these prints are made on the gelatine plate and I carved the birds from soft rubber and stamped them on the backgrounds, colouring by hand where necessary.

Autumn Reflections.

On a recent trip to the Melbourne Botanic Gardens I was delighted to see the wonderful reflections of the colourful Autumn foliage in the lake, just like an impressionist painting.

Some of the reflected green vegetation was also stunning when the slightest breeze blew the reflection into ripples.

                                                    What a lovely morning of photography!

Another Litle Book.

 Having made many, many gelatine prints over the last few years it's been a wonderful discovery to know that I can incorporate some of them into hand made books. There is a limit to how many can be framed and hung on a wall or offered for sale at exhibitions, so this new outlet for creativity has been so rewarding. This latest book using my prints is a variation on a Winged Book as described by Alisa Golden in her publication 'Making Handmade Books'.

              It's a little book telling the life history of a butterfly with suitable quotes throughout.

                           All the folds shown open out with more images and quotes to be seen.

                                                I've had so much fun making this little book!

Another New Project.

 Although I haven't taken photos of the rest of the book shown in the previous post, it is in fact finished!However,

I have been busy since then on other projects, one of which is a collection of postcard sized prints for an exhibition. Here is one of them, butterfly prints using the leaves of a Ginkgo tree growning in my back garden. A lot of the leaves look very like the wings of butterflies to me, so I chose some of the smaller ones and used them to print images on my gelatin plate. The background is a texture plate of open weave fabric that I made several years ago.

Continuing Project.

Here are all 4 of the centre and side page spreads for the new book. Each long strip will be folded in half and the smaller side panels attached at each end. Unfortunately the light shining on the metallic paint has once again made the prints difficult to see, and I have also added a little bit more to a couple of the images since I took the photo.