Morning Walk.

 We've been exploring all sorts of areas of our neighbourhood that we don't usually get to in the daily bustle of every day activities. However only being allowed to leave the house for daily exercise, we have been walking further afield and for longer. We'd never walked along this creek before, so it was lovely to explore a new track and to know that the loop around the creek is almost exactly 5 Km, about right for the daily walk these days.

With so little rain of late, the creek doesn't have much water in it, so that these lovely rocks are exposed at the moment. It will be interesting to compare this view over the coming months, especially if we get good rain soon.

Printing Again.

 After a break of a few days while the weather was just too lovely to stay indoors, the rain came down for a short while this afternoon, so it was back to the gelatine plate for another round of printing.
I didn't get as much done as I'd hoped to, as I was having trouble with the registration of the masks and the paper, as well as trying to work with a frame around the image.

The slipped registration is obvious in this print, but it's all trial and error at this stage and every mistake is a lesson learned.

Gorgeous Visitor.

Whilst there are lots of Rainbow Lorikeets in our suburb, we rarely have one visiting the garden. This one and 3 of its companions spent a noisy hour or so working over our Cape Honeysuckle hedge.
They are very hard to photograph as they are continuously jumping around from position to position for the best vantage point to get the nectar from the flowers.

Not All Art.

Whilst I am enjoying all the extra time available for artwork, I also love to cook. Today's offering of mixed flour loaves of bread, made with whole wheat flour, spelt flour, buckwheat flour and rye flour.
It's a sourdough bread made using my own sourdough starter. Can't wait to cut one of the loaves to see the 'crumb'!

More Layers.

 Having discovered this wonderful slow drying acrylic that works perfectly on a home made gelatine plate, I just had to have a few more colours. With a quick run to the art shop in the early morning I found Paynes Grey, Cadmium Red Medium, Burnt Sienna and the gorgeous Quinacridone Nickel Azo Gold, the latter has really blown me away with it's gorgeous orangey gold colour.

 Using some of my old hand carved stamps with various masks, layers and textures, I've had a lovely time experimenting during this forced isolation.

                                Again I'm debating the orientation, vertical or horizontal.?

          This is an older print that I rather liked, but I've added some colour and shape to the sides/top and bottom.

More Play.

               Having now got the type of ink sorted, it's time to really play with layers and masks.

                                   Orientation is also a consideration, vertical or horizontal?

What a difference!

Having a very good collection of acrylic paint in many colours I have always resisted the urge to buy the 'Open' paint for gelatin plate printing that is always recommended. The 'open' paint stays workable for a lot longer than normal acrylic paint and doesn't dry on the home-made plate I have discovered.

  I had such poor results from the new gelatin plate yesterday using the normal paint that I went out early and bought 4 tubes of the Golden Open acrylic paint. What an enormous difference !

There are so many imperfections in the gelatin plate that I will melt it down and re-mould it, but the results are so much better than I've ever been able to achieve before with straight acrylic paint. Watch this space!

A Few More.

 I'm still playing around with the idea of using my circular collagraph plates as stamps on the Geli plate. In this one I have tried out a stamp that I carved in a  spiral pattern and it prints quite well.

 This is another collagraph plate which didn't print very well by the conventional method, but might be better used in this medium.

This plate used crackle medium, but I'm not really happy with anything that has come from it so far, all too busy! As the circular plates were quite costly to get cut, I might just start again by covering the whole thing with texture paste.

Lateral Thinking.

 Rather than use my circular collagraph plates as they were intended to be used, for printing with a press, I tried using a couple of them as stamps on my gelatine plate. I really like this one where the plate has failed to print in one area.

 Using the same plate, but a much more regular result. As I intend printing over these, it really is only a starting point.

   With the addition of some previously carved rubber stamps. Now this does have potential! Unfortunately my commercial Geli plate is very badly pitted and has a lot of irregularities, and I'm not sure that my current home made one is any better. They actually do produce very different results too, even when pristine.

Disappointing.

 I was looking forward to printing from these new collagraph plates, but the results are very underwhelming! The one above has some nice areas, but over all it's just too busy.

 This one might be better with some over printing, but at the moment it's not up to much. I used some gritty texture paste over an old plate thinking that the older shapes would show through, but they didn't and I just have a mostly over all grainy texture. I do like the bits of white showing through.

            Again, this one is too busy, although it might also benefit from some overprinting.

This plate was one from a series that I started last year and never printed. It's turned out very pale due to the smooth texture of most of the plate, but the pattern is a bit too contrived as well. Oh well, I'll try the idea of over printing next time to see if any of these can be salvaged.

Playtime!

 I spent a happy couple of hours playing around with some old collagraph prints, some Thermofax screens and a stamp, just trying to see what might work  and what needs to be abandoned. I used the smaller of the 2 screens that I posted about a couple of days ago in the print above and it actually works quite well.

 I wasn't at all happy with the original collagraph print with it's pink centre, but with the addition of the figures it looks a lot more interesting.

 The print above is an inversion of the one below, the original being a collagraph plate made with modelling medium scraped through a stencil. This version with the white figures works better I think.

 The collagraph plate turned out to be very heavily embossed, so that the stamp didn't print very well.

 Another bit of play with the screen featuring the larger figures, printed over a collagraph plate that turned out too pale. It looks possible with the figures on top however.

                                                 Another plate with the smaller figures.

And the inversion of the one above, which I really like. Perhaps I should try printing on black paper to replicate the way this looks.

Sunsets.

 Like any keen photographer I love to catch the vivid colours of a sunset, so when I was looking in my catalogue of photos for something completely different, I came across quite a few taken over the years, so here is a sample of some of those.

             I'm actually not quite sure whether this and the one below are sunsets or sunrises.

 This one above reminds me of a particularly nasty bruise that I had after falling heavily down several steps!

                                              I just love the ripple effect across this one.

                                                         Taken from a plane window.

The Easy Way!

This is something that I haven't seen before! A tree had obviously fallen across the road and someone had kindly used a chain saw to cut a car sized gap in the log. Rather than leaving the approach to the tree on the far side open and easy to negotiate, the removed piece of log was just left on the road. As this area is a long way from any town, there are no street lights, so I hope the next vehicle that tries to get through at night is traveling slowly with good headlights!