Better Late than Never.

If you followed this Blog throughout 2017, you will see the Flower of the Month challenge cropping up regularly. One of the stitching groups to which I belong set out to make a small piece of textile art every month for a year reflecting the gardens that we visited, or particular flowers from our own gardens. By November I was just too busy to make the final 2 pieces for the year, so that project has taken a back seat to my printing exploits. However, I realised that with a new project already underway for 2018, I really needed to finish the series. This is for November, Clematis in a garden in the foothills of the Great Dividing Ranges in Victoria.

Almost Finished.

 I got onto a bit of a roll today (Sunday) and managed to print all the crosses well and managed to touch up a couple of the taps that didn't print quite as well. Although I still need to do some more of the black printing ink images, I was so wary of smudging what I had already done, that I moved onto the 2 shades of grey stamps using fade resistant dye ink stamp pads.

 These can sit and dry for a few days before I come in with the black ink again and over print the rest of the images.

In my original design I had more of the light grey foliage in central blank area and may yet add some more when everything else is completed.

Difficult Printing Paper

 For a particular project being run by the Print Studio that I belong to, we were each give 5 pieces of printing paper from which to produce 3 good copies. Unfortunately the paper was very heavily textured and as such very difficult to get a good print using the stamps that I had carved. You can see the patchy coverage above and the lack of detail in the face. I did a silly thing by printing the rest of the image first, leaving the angel to last, which was a waste of time as all the prints done this way are too poor to use.

 Luckily I had some other paper of my own that was very close to what had been supplied, so I tried the angel again, using my big heavy old book press to print with. Much better for most of the copies and provided that I don't mess up the rest of the printing I should be O.K for 3 copies.

            There are about 16 individual stamps for the entire image, so plenty of room for error!

Printing

 Having allowed sufficient time for the collagraph plates to dry, and having a few hours in which to print from them, I managed to get a couple of reasonable prints. The first plate above, resulted in the print below, which has some good bits and some that I'm not too happy with.

 The plate below also resulted in some interesting areas, and some parts that didn't quite print as I had hoped.

 I haven't ever had this halo effect in a print before, but I quite like it. This is the first print from the plate below and the second one underneath it.

 Again, there are bits that I really like, such as the very green 'trees' in the upper middle area and the vegetation along the lower edge.

Amazingly enough, after several coats of shellac and a thorough drying, the lichen that I used on the plates absorbed the clean- up water and jumped up off the plate!  I'll try sealing it with a gel medium and hope that the polymer does the trick. Weird!

Suburban Walk.

 It's almost Autumn here and I for one will be happy to say goodbye to the really hot weather. A view of the city from a local park on the early morning walk with some interesting clouds.

 Reflections in the windows of a glass fronted building. I just love the distortions of the architecture on the left hand side.

                                             A quick cup of coffee before the walk home.

Then there is this horrible sight immediately opposite my home, with its accompanying loud music blaring from the workmen's radio, mess and rubbish everywhere and the looming building ruining our view of the sky.

Mural.

I spotted this dragonfly mural some time ago on the wall of our local fresh produce market. There were always too many people in front of it to photograph it until this morning when I was out too early for the crowds. It's about 1.5 m across, so very big and striking, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to have a plaque acknowledging the artist. Notice the 2 fish on the hind wings! There is also a similarly made butterfly, but unfortunately the vandals have partially destroyed some of it. As my mother would have said, 'I could wring their necks'.

Registration.

 I carved this beetle during the week, intending to have the markings in black and the beetle in red or perhaps yellow.

 Easier said than done when working with stamps. It's not like a lino cut where the registration can easily be fixed, or at least I can't quite see how to do it with stamps, particularly as I don't think that I was careful enough to make the 2 stamps fit together exactly. Here above is a page of test prints, none of which line up correctly.

             Showing the 2 stamps, the beetle outline and the separate stamps for the markings.

     This is the closest that I came to an accurate placement. Not nearly good enough! Maybe I should cut the head of the markings stamp from the rest of the body and print them separately.

Making a New Collograph Plate.

 Whilst the previous plate worked reasonably well, I felt that I needed to make another one with more varied vegetation and more fine textures. Using the same basic idea of water, rocks and plants I started off with pieces of thin bark of various types.

                      Then I used pressed weed seed heads, lichen, sawdust and a little sand.

               With all the edges trimmed, it was time to coat the plate in several layers of shellac.

Watercolour Enhancement.

This is one of the copies of a collagraph plate that that I made recently.  There are a few faults, such as the creased paper in various places, but I decided to go ahead and enhance the picture a bit with watercolour anyway. I can see that it has possibilities on this particular print, so I'll try a few more and hopefully get some without the creases, which were probably caused by having the pressure on the press too high.

The Jewel in the Tomb!

 You might remember this tiny little Jewel spider photo that I posted  a few weeks ago, well there is one less of these in the world after this rather amazing looking wasp decided to paralyse one of the spiders and seal it up in her mud chamber for her larva to eat.

                                                Here she is packing the spider into it's tomb.

                           She's off to get another load of wet mud to seal up the entrance.

                                         All sealed up and ready to make another chamber.

 

                                                    Working hard on the second 'tomb'.

                                         What an amazing feat of engineering and precision.

Compensation.

 While it's been just too hot for me to get stuck into serious art work, there have been compensations in the garden, like this gorgeous Flowering Gum tree for one.

      The bees love the blossoms and the sound of their buzzing just fills the air around the tree.

This is just a tiny fraction of the overall mass of colour and blossoms on the tree.  The resulting gumnuts after the flowers have finished blooming need to be removed as much as possible, as their weight can easily snap branches off the tree when they are dry.

Dog in Paradise!

                                                    A hot day, a dog, a stick and a dam.

                                                        What could be better than that?

                                                   Another throw of the stick of course.

Find.

On my morning walk I'm always looking at piles of discarded items on people's nature strips and in hired skips, especially at the books that people throw out. This particular skip contained several in this series of travel books, but I can't actually find a date it was published. Full of black and white photos, fascinating advertisements and interesting maps, 6 of the books came home with me.

 

 The maps are attached at the spine of the books and are fairly fragile, and in some cases torn away almost completely from the book.

           I love this representation of the city view from the Bodleian library, Oxford University.

Carpet of Flowers.

Over the course of 2016 a group of friends and I set out to make a small (A5) piece of textile art each month reflecting a garden that we had visited during the month. Of course our own gardens were a source of images too, but we did try to feature other gardens, private and public. Some people chose to show views of a garden overall, and others decided to feature a flower from a different garden each month, as I did.
Although not everyone has managed to make a new piece each month, the ones finished so far make quite a display. It will be even more colourful when each of the seven people have made all 12 of their garden inspired artworks.

Poem Illustration.

 This is the first test print of the poem illustration using all the various components, however I'm not at all happy with a lot of it. First the Celtic Cross needs to be re- carved, it's too big and the decoration is not right. Don't worry, the angel is supposed not to have hands or arms!

  This I think will be better. All these test prints are done with stamp pad ink and the blacks are therefore very blotchy and pale. The final version will be printed with proper printing ink, then the worry will be that the fine detailed lines will be lost if the ink is applied too heavily!

Yes, definitely better. Now I need to carve some more foliage, no more flowers needed, but just some leaves. Nearly there.