Another Project!

Having had fun with the small circular collagraph plates I thought that I might try something bigger, so off I went to my local favourite framing shop to see if they could cut me some circles from scrap mount board. They could, at a cost of $9 each, which is $90 for the 10 that I wanted, completely out of the question costwise for something experimental. After a bit of negotiation, after all I had been a customer for over 25 years, we got the price down to something more or less reasonable, as well as an added pile of  scrap mount board thrown in for good measure. I now have 10 quite expensive 15 cm circles of cardboard to work on.  Some of the previously printed small ones reminded me of cross sections of plant stems, so I printed out a few from various sources that looked interesting and will attempt to transfer the basic outlines onto the cardboard. Watch this space!

Printing Session.

 These are some of the more successful trial prints of the small circular plates that I made a few days ago. Some of the ones that looked to have potential were hopeless, but some printed well. I really like this one. Click to see more details.

                                                                  Not very interesting.

                                              This one has the potential to be interesting.

 I love these ones with the 2 colours, but I think that I might make the plate again, avoiding the missing crackle effect in some of the larger shapes.

                                Might be worth adding a bit to the plate before printing again.
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Only One!

Although I had prepared more beetle images on the rubber than I thought I would need, I actually only managed to carve one and a bit in the 2 hours of demonstration that I had. This was the first one that I actually completed, although there are still a few bits that need to be tidied up. People were very interested in the process, so by the time I had described what I was doing and allowed them to try a bit of carving themselves, the time just flew past and this was the result, one finished beetle.

Not Biscuits !

 Although these look like thin biscuits with various toppings, they are in fact small circular collagraph plates with different media used for texture.

 I had to use a compass cutter for the circles and as it is quite heavy cardboard, I had trouble getting the small cutter to cut right though. I also had to fill in the hole of compass point in some way. The top 2 plates are created with 'blended fibre' medium as is the lower right one.

 Here you can see the different textures, all made through various stencils using the different media. The top small plate uses moulding paste , top right crackle medium, bottom left is a medium called 'black lava' that has fine grit embedded in it and the lower right one is more crackle medium

         More 'black lava' on this one which I hope will produce a really interesting printed texture.

Batch of Beetles.

Melbourne has an Open House scheme running over a weekend once a year where all sorts of places are open to the public. Some are open fairly regularly and for some this is the only time that just anyone can go and have a look inside a venue. As part of the scheme, The Firestation Print Studio, Here of which I am a member, is open to the public over this weekend. Once a real working fire station, the building is now a working print art studio. The building itself is interesting, with the large open area on the ground floor with it's concrete floor and big arched windows where the engines lived and the many small rooms upstairs that served as bedrooms for the firemen who were on duty. These are now small studios that are rented out to various printmakers. Over the weekend various members of the group will be demonstrating different forms of printmaking, and of course my technique of choice to demonstrate is stamp carving. I have drawn out onto carving rubber 6 different beetles ready for the Saturday morning demonstration. It will be interesting to see how many I manage to finish in the three and a half hours, allowing for chatting with people as they come through the studio.

A Weekend in the Bush.l

 Even though the weather was very cold with a freezing wind blowing, these 6 little New Holland Honey-eaters decided that it was time for a bath.

 With much flapping and splashing, they all had a wonderful time in the bird bath regardless of the weather.

I spotted these evil looking toadstools  on a morning walk.  They obviously aren't as toxic to wildlife as they look, as something had taken a big bite from the one furthest away from my camera.

Beetles from the Past.

I've been carving beetle stamps for quite a while now, as evidenced by these two textile pieces worked some 5 years ago. I carved the stamps, printed them out, scanned them into the computer and worked up the image from there.

The gum leaves too were stamped out in the same way. I don't think that I will ever run out of interesting beetle shapes to carve and use thank goodness!

Koalas Climbing.

         Looking back through the stamps that I've carved so far this year for the 12 Aussie Days of Christmas project, I came across the koala stamp and realised that I hadn't shared either it or the finished page with the Blog world. The tree is a magnificent Eucalypt that has been standing in a paddock for decades, and I have photographed it many times over the 20 years that I have known it. I have pictures of it in fog, in drought dry grass (as above) and all sorts of weather conditions in between. I haven't actually seen a koala in this particular tree, but I have seen one or more in adjacent trees over the years. I finished this image, printed it and added it to the others, but when I went back to scan it for this post, I found that I had actually included 8 koalas climbing. One had to go, and it did! Click on the image for a closer look at the 7 koalas.

6 Brolgas Dancing.

 Here are the 2 carved Brolga stamps together. They both have minor faults, but given that they both have to be very much reduced in size, the miss-carvings just won't be noticed.

 And here we have the three pairs of Brolgas dancing in the bush together. Again I have used one of my own photographs as the background, something that I have done with all the various birds and animals in the series.

First Brolga.

As the next month in the Australian Christmas Series features 6 Brolgas Dancing, I've started to carve the first of the 2 stamps that I want to use. Once again I will make the background from one of my own photos, but this time it  won't show the actual area that you might find a Brolga frequenting. They do have a wide habitat range across the country, but I just haven't taken a suitable photo, so I'll 'cheat' a little this time. Here I'm trying out the stamp for the first time, and it isn't too bad, just a few things to correct.

Beetle for August.

Here is the final beetle piece for the month of August. I have a few busy weeks coming up, so it was a case of getting on and making this ahead of time. The colour chosen for September is pink, so that will be an interesting challenge! I also need to get on and make a stamp to use for the other monthly challenge, the Aussie Days of Christmas. The next one is 6 Brolgas dancing, which should be fun.

New Beetle Stamp.

The next beetle will have a yellow background, the colour chosen by the group for the month of August. I have my hand-dyed fabric for all sorts of colours, so I'm sure that I have something yellow. The beetle will probably be black rather than the colours shown above in my test print.

Sold!

My print, Dragon Tide, has recently been displayed in an exhibition at the Southern Highland Print Studio in New South Wales. It was part of a fascinating exchange of prints between their studio and the Firestation Print Studio in Malvern, Melbourne. Someone liked my print enough to buy it, and luckily I have another copy to display at our reciprocal exhibition later in the year.

Stamps.

Here I used one of the paler background prints from yesterday's session. I worked up a little design using an old butterfly stamp that I carved some years ago and a tiny little new one that I made especially for this piece of work. The strips of geometric shapes were also carved yesterday. I think this sort of design has potential, but not on the very dark backgrounds that resulted from the print session.