Sunday 3 March 2024

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.

Wednesday 24 January 2024

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.

Monday 8 January 2024

A Couple More.



I am more or less thinking of energy being broadcast from these spheres, so I am cutting rubber stamps with patterns that I can use to depict 'energy',  repeated marks such as the ones above.

Sunday 7 January 2024

New Project for 2024.

Responding to notification for an exhibition of artists books later in the year, I have been exploring some ideas for a new book. My previous entries have been books featuring insects in general and beetles in particular. Below are some preliminary prints on a completely different, and for me, unusual topic.  The book is going to be an 'expanding accordion' book, which features a little bit of sewing of spines, and I think it will make an effective display of the prints, both sides of which will be seen. 



I'm using a lot of metallic paint on the gel plate, making it very hard to photograph, perhaps scanning is the way to go.

Tuesday 12 December 2023

Butterflies Galore!

 I've loved butterflies my entire life and can never get enough of them into my art. Using a gelatine plate and hand cut collage here are 3 recent butterfly pictures.





Wednesday 8 November 2023

"Exploding' Books



 I recently attended a wonderful workshop to learn how to make an exploding book. This is only one name for this technique, but it's a good one given how the book works. We were told that all the items for the book would be supplied with the exception of the prints to be used, so I just bundled up a pile of old prints in 2 different colourways, orange and green and hoped that I would have enough suitable prints to make the little book. I did and below is the result, first the front cover with the pages folded and then the book opened out.

After making the book in class I decided to use up parts of old eco printed paper to make another book, to see if I could make it without the excellent guidance of the tutor. I only made 2 small mistakes and what's more I used up a lot of those old prints.



Sunday 8 October 2023

Lots of Bottles.

 I seem to have a theme going at the moment on my Gel plate, bottles. I'm not sure what inspired this theme, but I'm having fun making various prints using the bottle masks that I made.

In this one above I added pieces of vegetation sort of inserted into the necks of the bottles, but I'm not sure if that works or not. More play needed I think!



This one above actually has 10 green bottles, quite by accident and not design, so of course it is called '10 Green Bottles'.

Wednesday 20 September 2023

Angry Bird!

This fine fellow, or Lady-Bird, was most unhappy that I appeared in the doorway to take his/her photo. Screeching loudly he/she told me in no uncertain terms to go away!!