Blue Tongue Lizard.

Unfortunately this large Blue Tongue lizard had been killed on the road, well just an unmade bush track really that has very little traffic in a day.  Somehow this poor lizard was run over, I do hope that someone wasn't idiotic enough to do it deliberately. I just loved the pattern on the back of the animal.

Another Idea.

 I thought that the stamped images on the fabric were too indistinct, so I decided to go back over most of them with my original hand carved stamps and a darker colour.  It was quite difficult to line up the images on the fabric with the stamps, but I managed to get it pretty close in all but one case.

Here I thought that I might try to line up parts of the spirals in the sun prints with the circular edges of the stamps, then I could carry the stitching through from background to foreground.......maybe.

More Spiral Play

 I printed out a copy of a possible background on A3 paper and rather liked the different colours that appeared, the various shades of blue, but I lost a lot of that when I printed it out again onto A3 treated fabric, seen in the two images  below.

 I quite like the contrast between the orange background and the sepia spiral designs, but I'm not at all sure which bits to place where. I want to machine outline most of the background designs before placing anything on top, so I have a lot of time to continue playing.

      I wonder what the purple images would look like on the orange background....hmmm.....

Still Playing with the Gelli Plate.

 

                       I'm still playing around with the Gelli plate and my hand carved stamps.
I always had trouble with my home made gelatine plate seeming to dry out the acrylic paints, partly because of the warm weather that we've been having but even in the cool weather I was having trouble. I decided to try some 'Drying Retarder' and what a difference that makes!

    The acrylic paint stays nice and wet and I only need just a few drops to make the difference.
   I'm thinking of using these mono-prints as a sort of background to the more definite sun-prints, rather than the solid black or purple that I've been trying out recently. More play necessary!

 

Watch Out!

Luckily it was a cool windy morning, so it was unlikely that the snakes were about. This is only about 7km from the centre of Melbourne!

Waste not Want not!

 Another Gelli print with my hand carved stamps and the commercial stencil, but this time I also
used a collage plate made out of all the fine bits of off-cuts of 'rubber' from when I originally carved the stamps. Needless to say, I've fiddled with the colours a bit in Photoshop.

The original plate above, and a Photoshop inverted image below. 

Gelli Plate Printing.

 I thought that I would try out my new stamps on the Gelli Plate, but I didn't have much success, as it was such a warm day and the paint kept on drying up too quickly.

                       This isn't too bad, but it's just part of a larger one that was pretty awful!

 

             Here I also used a commercial stencil that seemed to fit the theme as well as the stamps.

                       The one above I really like.....it's a computer colour inversion of the one below.

         Not much of the stamp is visible, just a piece of one of the smaller ones on the lower right.
                   Oh well, one good print for a couple of hours work isn't too bad I suppose.

Cutting Stamps.

 I wanted to cut some stamps based on the images in my sun prints, so here are the first efforts, sort of O.K. but not that good overall. The leaf shape is fairly clear to see in the print, but the circular stamps are based on the inner most circle of the spiral, not so easy to spot.

The stamps themselves mounted temporarily on Perspex with double sided tape. The largest one is 7.5 com across.

Morning Walk.

This mother and large young were standing apart from the large mob of kangaroos that I spotted on our early morning walk today.  It wasn't until I downloaded the photo that I spotted the other 'roo lying in the grass.

This and That.

                                                                 Amber in the making.

Lovely wild blackberries, but first one needs to cover up before picking, with fingerless gloves to protect the backs of the hands, long sleeved thick shirt to protect the arms, thick jeans to protect the legs and sturdy boots to protect against snakes. Oh, and a pair of secateurs to cut one's way in!

The Bird bath Antics.

      A New Holland Honeyeater contemplates having a nice bath on a warm summer afternoon.

                                        Hmmmm, not a bad temperature, about right actually.

                                                      This is just great, a nice warm bath.

                                                          Wow, that was really good!

                                                      In fact, I think I'll have another go.

A Series of Trial Prints.

 Although I intend carving my own spiral stamp, I thought I would gather a selection of metallic paints and see how they showed up on the purple fabric using one of the commercial stamps.

The iridescent mauve looks good on the purple, but doesn't show up much on the patterned fabric.
Maybe I'll have to use several colours of paint, or go with a bronze which does show up on all fabrics. Decisions, decisions!

Another Design Element.

 I had intended carving my own spiral stamp, but first I thought I should check to see what commercial spiral stamps I had in my collection.

                                            These above are  not quite what I had in mind.

 The one on the left looks as if it should be useful, but the design is a bit hard to ink up consistently.
                                                The other one is O.K, but a bit too regular.

I would prefer to use the bronze ink, but this particular pad doesn't have sufficient ink to cover properly.  Verdict, I'll carve my own stamp and try various other colours on the purple background first before a final decision.

Purple on Purple?

     Probably too much purple now, and the top left 2 similarly coloured pieces don't work for me.

Still Playing Around.

 I started to wonder if a black background might be the answer in terms of contrast, but although it does indeed provide a contrast, perhaps the purple would provide more of a 'zing' to the composition.

 

With a burst of sunny weather today I dashed off a couple of purple spiral patterns which I think will work well, although the top left green piece is worrying me in that position.

 

Eucalypt Blossom.

         Hanging over the fence from a neighbour's garden is this very pretty flowering Gum tree.
You can see the blossom in all stages, from fully out to tightly closed buds and all stages in between.

Still Playing Around.

 I found a piece of purple fabric in my stash that's exactly the right colour.  It looks a bit too blue here, but it's quite purple in reality.

 I had hoped to make an actual purple sun print from one of the negatives, but it's been cloudy all day.

Since taking this photo I've changed over the bottom left 2 pieces, the bigger one is now lower down.
It's a bit better balanced I think as a result, but maybe the in between strips are too wide ?

The Next Step.

Taking my courage in both hands I cut into my sun prints in order to eventually make one cohesive piece and I cut them a bit bigger than I really want, to allow a bit of leeway in the final size. The top left large motif is obviously out of place in scale, although the colour is about right for balance.
I think a couple of splashes of purple might be in order too.

Return to the Spirals.

 I started working with this spiral image some months ago, but have continued on with it again this year.  While I wanted to sun print the whole image, the idea was to only use part of each one.

 If have seen my previous work in the Blog with this image, you will remember that I played around in Photoshop with the original large spiral, copying and pasting various sizes of the image together.

                                                     This above is a 4 x copy and paste.

                                               Again, a detail of the above 4 times image.

 The photos seem to have got out of order, but no matter, this above is a detail of the positive and negative section of part of the original image magnified. Getting complicated isn't it?

I'm staying with the 3 main colours, teal, burnt orange and sepia, but I may add another for more contrast at a later date.

Another very Hot Day.

 With the temperature around 40°C today, I was happy to spend the day experimenting again with sun printing, even though I had to go outside constantly to put items into the sun and to retrieve them again. You can see the negative for this one above in yesterday's post.

 It's amazing what detail can be obtained from a negative of grasses. Lots of play possibilities here.

Anyone following this blog might recognise an image that I made sometime last year just for fun.
The butterflies are all photographs of actual butterflies that I have in a long-ago-butterfly collection and I made a fun printer's tray of images with the photos, then made a negative and then sun printed it today. It's not quite what I was aiming for, a sort of cyanotype, but again it's amazing what detail can be obtained.