The Rose.

I found it very hard to photograph the rose this morning, the colours just aren't right ! Anyway, it's finished and with a little bit of extra paint on the outside edges of the petals, it has come up reasonably well.

Back to the Textiles.

 With only a day to go before the end of the month I thought that I had better get on with my flower for the month of October. I spotted a pink and white rose in a garden nearby and thought that it would fit in with all the other flowers that I've done so far. I found a pink and white silk scarf that I had dyed many years ago and never liked, so decided that as the pink was about the right shade I'd cut it up for the petals of the rose.

 Although you probably can't see it in the photo, I've stitched leaf shapes on the background using the automatic patterns in my ancient Pfaff sewing machine. The machine is decades old, but is my trusty day by day work horse. With all the petals fused into place and the edges of them stitched, together with the outline I started to sew the central area.

With the stamens done it only remains to be backed and edged in satin stitch to be pronounced finished.

Two Steps Forward & One Back!

Flush with the success of the last printing session, I went ahead and made 2 larger but somewhat similar collograph plates. Here they are glued, sealed and painted with gesso ready to go.

 

 The faint colour showing through is the colour of the original mount board scraps that I had to hand. Once again I have used pressed grasses and the mulberry bark pieces.

 First print is very disappointing, too dark and the grasses are very indistinct. What a waste of good sized printing paper!

 This one is a little better, but still not up to much. I decided to reprint one of the successes of the last session just to see if it was the plate at fault or the different paper that I was using.

Hmmm, this is actually better than the previous print, so it's definitely not the paper. It must be that the plate is at fault. It may be that the grasses are too thick and the mulberry bark too thin so that it doesn't create the obvious vine like marks of the print above. I won't abandon the poor prints completely, with the cost of the paper to consider, so I might try a soft water colour on the paler ones. It looks as if I need to make some more plates and really concentrate on the elements not being too thick. Back to the drawing, well collograph board.

That's More Like it!

I decided that the collograph plates needed more texture, so I coated each one in Gesso, then covered it under pressure with cling wrap.  The gesso didn't dry under the pressure, but did take up the texture from the plastic wrap which stayed there as it dried.

 

 The resulting prints are much more what I had in mind, but even so there is room for improvement!

 Plate one with just 3 heads of our native Kangaroo Grass, and some strands of mulberry bark teased out and added in the lower area.

 This is the print from the second plate with more grass seed heads and a little rub of yellow paint at the top. I like that the mulberry bark has taken up such a lot of ink, as it seems to anchor the larger grasses and give a good bit of contrast.

   This is the ghost print on a very much lighter weight paper, which gives quite a different effect.

First Press Test

My results from printing the pressed grasses and using the butterfly resists were rather underwhelming to say the least! I used some paper given to me that had quite a regular texture to it which I didn't like, but just as well I didn't waste good paper on these test prints. In the one below, I forgot to remove the butterfly resists !!

 

 This time I removed the resists and followed that up with a stamped image in each ink free  spot.

   A bit more contrast might be a good idea perhaps. This one below was on a smoother paper which gave a better print, but lacked the  'feel' of rough printing paper.

 This one below here is perhaps more interesting with the lighter ink coverage and the textured paper.

 Here I've inked in some of the details of the print which gives more definition, although I'm not sure  that it's quite the result that I'm looking for.

                   I don't like all the butterflies heading off in the same direction either!

The Next Project.

 Some time ago I tried my hand  collograph plate printing, but without much success. I found a couple of my already sealed bases from the previous attempt and decided to have another go with some of my pressed grasses combined with some mulberry bark and resists using my smallest butterfly stamp. Here I've adhered the grasses and bark to the already sealed piece of cardboard with an all purpose sealant.

 Once dampened with the sealant, the grasses decided to pop up and not lie nice and flat, what to do? I decided to cover the whole plate in plastic cling wrap and put it under my old trusty and very heavy book press seen below. It weighs a great deal, so if that doesn't flatten the grasses, nothing will!

 Success, nice flat Kangaroo Grass. I stamped my smallest carved butterfly onto heavy paper and cut out 3 copies to use as resists., sticking them in place with a tiny bit of double sided sticky tape.

                              This is the second plate all ready for tomorrow's printing session.

Shore Birds.

 On board a boat for a trip around Western Port Bay today, we passed a small island with a group of birds on the shoreline. They were mostly Pied Cormorants, with the odd Silver Gull and an Oyster Catcher in the background, but definitely no Curlew Sandpiper, the bird that I featured recently in my art work. As you can see from the notice no-one is allowed to land on the island and we were quite some distance away, so the birds are a little out of focus.

            There is an odd looking dark bird on the far left that I haven't managed to identify yet.

Playing Around.

Just for fun I stamped a few of the new rubber Stenocarpus flowers over the grey test lino image, still with it's ridges from the carving.

This is the idea that I had right from the start, a greyish under image with highlights strategically placed on top. Maybe 5 is too many however and should I make a few leaves to print in green too..........probably not!

Some Success, Some Not so Successful.

 Today I carved 3 versions of the Firewheel tree flowers, which turned out quite well. The ones at the top of the page are the first prints and the second and third are further cleaning up of the stamp.

 Not so successful was the Ulysses butterfly stamp. I chose that species of butterfly because of it's contrasting colours, and the fact that it occurs in the same tropical rainforest area as the Stenocarpus tree grows in.

I had a small piece of a different rubber variety to use, but it's so soft and buttery that I found it difficult to get good edges. Added to which, the veins of the butterfly's wings are really needed to break up the bright blue, but are very difficult to carve, especially with this very soft rubber. Not really usable I don't think. Back to the usual carving medium I think.

More Lino Cutting.

Even with a cut finger I forged ahead and started to really get moving with cutting out the image.

 

 Here is the first print, just with a grey stamp pad, to see how things are looking. Over all I'm quite pleased.  The seed pods are a bit out of proportion, being a little too small, but perhaps they're a lot further back than the flowers!

 This is the piece of lino with the ink still on it. I left the blank piece of uncarved lino in the top right hand corner on purpose as I thought that I might carve something like an insect there, but I'm not sure if I will or not. Easy to remove it if I go ahead and don't like it however.

                                     Now to clean up all the ridges and bits that are too high.

Starting the Lino Cut.

 It's just a trick of the light, but where I have carved away the lino it looks as if it's raised above the drawing! I hope that I can manage to carve this image as the flowers are quite fine and delicate. You can enlarge the photo a little by clicking on it.

Here I've carved out 3 leaves and 2 of the flowers, but unfortunately I had to stop here as I slipped with the sharp cutting tool and cut one finger quite deeply. I'm usually more carful than that, but of course it is Friday 13th!

Revisiting the Pods.

   Earlier this year I carved several types of Stenocarpus pods for a little book that I was making.

          Each pod is separate, so can be combined to make different images of clusters of pods.

 This is a page from the book using 3 of the carved pod blocks. The paper in the book was coloured using a solution of mud, which gave this lovely ochre colour.

 Here are the 3 blocks that I used to make the more elongated type of pods seen in the image above.
You might wonder why I am reposting these pictures from January this year, but I am about to use the pods blocks again, however first I need to carve the leaves which will be reasonably simple, but the gorgeous red flowers are another level of difficulty! Watch this space!

The Hardest Part.

Having now printed several reasonable copies of my Curlew Sandpipers, the hardest part is writing the accompanying 'blurb' in just 150 words. All the prints will eventually be bound into concertina books, with gifted copies going to the State Libraries of Queensland and Victoria, as well as to the National Library of Australia. There will be digital reproductions made as well, so it's quite an undertaking for the organisers. The prints will be on display at the Firestation print Gallery in Melbourne from June 6th to 23rd, 2018 as well.

 

 

Various studios and organisations are taking part in the general project Here all presenting different ways of raising awareness of the plight of our over wintering shore birds.

Return to the Bird Prints.

 I really needed to get a move on with the 4 prints that I want to make for the  current Overwintering project. Here I've stamped my original rubber cuts onto paper and backed them with some rigid plastic sheets.

 I want to use them as a resist when I sprayed the background. You might just be able to see where the resists were as I sprayed the papers with a light grey iridescent paint. Click for a larger view.

 Now I can stamp the birds, Curlew Sandpipers, onto the clear backgrounds to give the birds white bodies without the background grey making them speckled. I've stamped the larger bird in the darkest colour, the medium sized bird a slightly lighter colour and the smallest bird quite a pale grey.

All 3 birds on the background now. Next comes the stamps of the water, but I think that I'll need to carve a few more before I start the final stamping for this project.

Backgrounds with Photoshop.

Sometimes we all need some interesting backgrounds for our artwork, and I always start with my collection of photos. I have taken many photos of tree bark, cut tree logs and so on over the years and although they are all interesting and varied, they aren't always suitable just as they are. The colour might be wrong for a start. The pictures below are all of tree bark except for 2 which show the cross section of a cut log.

 It is so easy to change the colour of an image in Photoshop and one of the easiest way is just to invert the colours, so that orange for instance becomes blue.  The bark image above is much more interesting with the colour changed from dull greyish brown to a jade hue.

      The cross section of this log looks more like an ammonite or shell with the colour inverted.

         Not so interesting is this palm trunk, but it could still be used as a background, looking like mountain peaks or rocks.

             Smooth plane tree trunks can be made more interesting with the invert command.

 This one is paper bark, and the flakes of bark make for a very interesting background once the colours have been inverted.

Another cross section of a log, this time changed to green hues. It looks more like contoured fields I think.

Very Fancy!

My favourite dessert if I'm eating out is crème caramel, but I have never been given one quite like this before! The toffee was nice and thick so that it gave a satisfying crack with the spoon, but on top was layered a shortbread biscuit, 3 tiny dots of milk chocolate custard with 3 honeycomb like pieces of something on top of that and decorated with a few little pieces of greenery, exactly what I'm not sure. It was all delicious, but I would have been just as happy with the basic crème caramel on it's own!

 

Royal Botanic Gardens Melbourne.

 This is the embankment running down from the Temple of the Winds to the 'tan' a running track that circles the Botanic gardens. You can just see the small temple at the top of the picture. The white columns of flowers are, I think, African Lobelias or white Echium and the pink colours are flowers of a succulent.

 Although I don't need to photograph another flower for the month, I couldn't resist these Tree Peonies in the Asian garden section. They are just so huge and delicate at the same time.