Double Sun Prints.

 The sun print above turned out to be unfortunate pink and purple colours, perhaps due to the age of the solutions. I may go ahead and paint over it to get rid of those colours, as it should have been orange not pink!

 I spent a couple of hours this afternoon over printing some of my previous sun prints, and I'm very happy with a lot of the results. This one above using pressed Grevillia leaves is my favourite from the session I think.

 I like parts of this one, but not as a whole piece. It seems to show seaweed under water ripples in some areas.

Because I'm mixing all sorts of colours to use them up before they are useless due to be so old, I'm getting a lot of mud colours. This one however picks the blue up nicely, providing a good contrast to the shades of brown.

Further Sunprint Play.

 I have been scouring the neighbourhood recently for branches of fine leaves that are hanging over fences and therefore O.K to pick. This one on the right is exactly what I was looking for.
On the left is a print using partly skeletonised leaves that I picked up in the bush and I think that a technique using these leaves is worth further investigation.

 

Here is another one using similar leaves, but it also includes the commercially available skeleton leaves.  I think that I prefer the random light coming through in the prints of the leaves that I found myself.

Another print using 2 different sizes of fine leaves, both of which make nice strong prints.

 Here is a random selection of dried and pressed grasses. The finer ones have printed very well, but the thicker more solid heads lack definition.

Above is another negative made from a photo of grass heads against the sky. Interesting image, but at the moment I'm not quite sure where I would use it.

Something Completely Different!

 No, not an intentional work of art, but a corner of the white sheet that I have had on my work table for the last few years to mop up all the drips and splodges of spilled paint and ink.

    To my mind it looks even better when the colours are inverted in Photoshop. Now it almost looks like a  work of art..................maybe.

Leaves & Moths.

Here is the finished Leaves and Moths sun print with added stamped images. I didn't like the single large moth so I have added 2 of the smaller versions, and also used a gold ink pen to colour the patterns on the wings. Anyone who has been following me for a while would perhaps recognise the moth stamps as the ones that I used in my large Moth Mandala work a few months ago. That's the good thing about individual stamps as opposed to a large collagraph or lino cut, they can be used over and over again in different contexts.

Adding to the Sunprints.

 I've rolled some orange paint along the backs of the 3 vine tendrils and pressed them onto the negative spaces on the leaves of the sun print. That blank space in the upper middle called for something extra, but I'm not sure if I like the angle of the carved Softcut moth stamp. It might have been better to turn it a little more to the right, but it's too late now as I was working on an original sun print.

Using the Photoshop Invert command, the colour inversion is quite interesting, with the orange marks of the ink on the pressed leaves becoming speckled with green like the green of the originally orange moth.

Sun Prints Part 2.

 With every day adding to the age of my hoarded sun printing inks, I grabbed the first available sunny day without wind to print off some more images, this time with pressed foliage rather than negatives. Melbourne is generally known for it's windy Spring, but this Autumn has been very windy too.

 Although I put a sheet of window glass over the items to be printed, I still don't want leaves or dust to be blown over the image. If you can look closely you can see where some of the leaves have tiny insect  holes nibbled in them and the light has made speckles on the blocked out areas.

 Here I tried some commercial skeletonised leaves with mixed success. They need to be very closely in contact with the paper to make a good print and the rest of them on this sheet of paper were indistinct due to them not being completely flattened by the glass. I really like this corner however.

 I have been pressing tendrils of various vines that I pick on my morning walk with the view to using them pressed, but they seem to make better contact with the paper when they are still soft and not quite dried out.

In the sun, the glass developed condensation on the underside and reacted with the ink in the corners of the paper, but it's quite interesting the way it's only in the corners.

Printing Session.

 I decided to mount the inner parts of the Bottlebrush flower onto a piece of acrylic to make the placement easier. I also made a 'forme' on the plate for the little printing press so that it would all line up accurately.

 I wasn't sure whether to print the red/pink colour first, or whether the back would be strong enough to print the colour on top of it. I was trying out various types of paper too, the cream ones here are a thick cotton printing paper and the white ones are multi media paper. I hadn't realised that the cream pieces were a little shorter than the white ones, so I got the placement of the first couple of prints wrong unfortunately.

 The main lino cut is also mounted on acrylic and fitted into the same 'forme' as the coloured sections.

 Here is the first of the series of combined prints, some of which are O.K and some of which aren't so good. I had trouble with the paper sliding slightly as it went through the press which gave me some blurry lines.

 In the end, I decided that the stamp ink over the lino print gave the best result, as it was less dense than the 'proper' printing ink and I preferred that look.

Here's the lino without the colour, which shows the difference between a stamp pad inked image that I made yesterday and one today using the correct printing ink.

Adding Colour.

 I've set myself a bit of a challenge, to add colour to the Bottlebrush flower before I print the leaves. It's easy to add the colour after the main branch, but to add it before requires  very good registration, which I haven't mastered as yet. Here above are the 3 splashes of colour in the correct orientation, carved in "SoftCut' and mounted on cardboard.

I stamped the red colour first and then tried to line up the lino exactly over the red. Not so easy I discovered. Here it's too far to the right, but how to line it up correctly I'm not quite sure. I'm still proofing with stamp ink, hence the patchy image. Until I get it all sorted, there is no point in setting up with printing ink and a press.

Back to the Lino.

 With another exhibition coming up soon, I wanted more Botanical prints from which to choose pieces for the exhibition . Here is the start of a Bottlebrush lino cut.

 It isn't going to be easy to get the spikiness of the flowers, but I think that this method will work.

            It's looking O.K so far, but removing all the surrounding lino will be a challenge.

                 I think that the edges are too straight and even, but a test print will check that.

 
  Not too bad at all really. Just a bit of a rough edge work needed and I'll be set to try a 'proper' print.

Ripples in the Sun.

 This above is an A4 sized negative that I printed from a series of small stencils combined in Photoshop to make the larger size that I wanted. I printed 2 so that I could sticky tape them together to make the blacks more dense to block out more of the sun.

 Using the very old opened bottle of purple sun dye I ended up with pink and a dark mauve rather than white and dark purple. It suggested sunset on the water to me so I added the little swimmer that I had already printed to the picture.

Not quite what I set out to achieve, but quite interesting I think. It probably could do with a trim too.

Playing with Sunprints and Stamps.

 I made copies of a couple of my sunprint pattern pages and played around with my new beetle stamps on top of them. The addition of the colour to the large beetle makes all the difference and I can now line up the 2 stamps pretty accurately to get a combined print. I rather like this on the patterned sunprint, even though the beetle outline blends in a bit. It's almost like some sort of fancy wallpaper! I'll try it out again with a couple more of the large beetles before I commit to using the original printed paper. The Rhinoceros beetle just disappears on this darker background print.

I just placed these Rhinoceros randomly to see if they would work on this blue background. Bearing in mind that the beetles are stamped with just ink from a stamp pad rather than much darker printing ink, I think that it will work quite well.

Sunprinting.

 Some years ago I bought several bottles of all the available colours of  Jacquard's SolarFast sun printing ink. I was not aware that it had a short shelf life of only 6 months once opened and 2 years if unopened, and it's been sitting in my collection of art materials for over the 2 year limit. I decided that I wanted to make some sunprints and was somewhat dismayed when the colours were dull and not at all what I wanted. Of course I went to the web site to find out why and discovered the life span of these inks, which is not written on the bottles.  I had lots negatives that I had made years ago, so I decided to use up the inks as best I could before they were totally useless! Above are 2 prints that are the inversion of each other. The mud colour is a bit dull, but might work as backgrounds.

 Again, one positive and one negative. The trees were made with the heads of fine 'shivery' grass, and the lightening was a digital brush.

The real reason I wanted to use the SolarFast was to make a piece for a specific exhibition that stipulated the use of the human body. Rather than join the ranks of people exhibiting nudes, I worked on a photo of a little swimmer, (who is now over 40 years old), jumping into a backyard swimming pool. I'm not quite sure where this is going, but we'll see.

Rhinoceros Beetle Stamp.

I have carved several beetles before now, but they have always been seen from above as it were, so this side view  is new to me and a little more difficult to carve I think. My original drawing of the Rhinoceros beetle is on the left, and the new stamp, mounted on a piece of Perspex is to the right, and I think that the best image from the stamp is the lower right version. I seem to have misplaced my black ink pad, so I printed this one in a darkish grey, I don't think that it shows the beetle off very well though.

Dry, Dry, Dry!

 We have just experienced one of our dried Februarys with only about 1.4ml of rain for the whole month. Even on a dry hillside these Belladonna lilies are flowering beautifully. These are the shorter white/pale pink varieties, but if you look carefully you can see the remains of the tall darker pink ones at the back right.

                                  Nothing but dry grass and leaves as far as the eye can see.

                       Even this little Bronze Wing Pigeon is looking a bit hot and bothered.

Return to the Dam.

 Although the water is much lower in the dam this week, there was still plenty of depth for a dog to swim in to retrieve sticks. If we don't get rain soon however, she'll be walking into a puddle to fetch sticks next time!

                                Well out of her depth here, so it's dog paddle to the bank.

 Where just a few weeks ago she was swimming right up to the bank, now it's her knee depth and an exposed mud bank ahead.

                                                                Another stick please!

The Full Moon.

I first started taking photographs as a young child, progressing from an Agfa Box camera through the ranks of SLRs with the last one being a Pentax that I lugged around on my travels. It was heavy, had an external light meter and of course used expensive film and processing. I used to love my little half frame Olympus Pen as it was compact and light, but it too used rolls of film which cost even more to process as there were double the number of exposures to be printed.
Now of course there are digital cameras, and I am constantly amazed at what they are capable of. This shot of a full moon was taken with my Panasonic Lumix TZ60, which is by no stretch of the imagination a top digital camera, but what a result!