Mixed Media.

This print really is a mix of different media. The original background with the honeycomb shapes used small laser cut wooden shapes pressed into the painted gelatin plate. Then came another layer of acrylic paint with some masks for the circles, followed by 4 separate Gocco screens for the bees and the hives. After that I rolled paint onto some pressed foliage and applied that to the lower edge of the paper. Finally a touch of water colour to the striped bodies of the bees. Oh and I forgot, a piece of textured wallpaper adhered to a cardboard plate was also pressed into the painted gelatin at one stage, although the resulting marks are a little hard to see. Mixed Media indeed!
 

Phoenix Rising.

This print has seen several reincarnations, but none have seemed to really work well. This time I added another layer of colour which included the figure, a stencil that I made from a magazine image and some pseudo text. The larger version on the right is a stamps that I carved a few years ago. The smaller gold version and the phoenix are small Gocco screens which I made this week. It does still need something, but I'm not sure what!

 

Morning Walk.

You just never know what you'll see when out walking for the legal 2 hours of exercise a day. Some enterprising person has stuffed these old jeans into a standing position and put small pots of flowers into the tops. Aren't they a lot of fun

It would seem that a cheeky possum has taken over the chosen nesting spot of this Rainbow Lorikeet.

                                 Here a pair of Rainbow Lorikeets are 'chatting' in another tree.

                                            Next a couple of striking looking Protea flowers.

 

Just Playing Around.

I recently bought some rubber cog and gear stamps, so to try them out I stamped this page in my sketch book, just for fun. I added several other stamped images and either stamped or added to them with orange ink. However I do feel as though I should only use my own carved stamps in art work, but these cogs and gears are really too intricate for my carving skills unfortunately.

More Flowers.

I must admit that the flowers extending beyond the margin here is an attempt to make a mistake took intentional! The lower right stamped flower just went over the margin accidentally, so the other 2 were then stamped a little further over the margin as well. That meant that in order to make the piece the required 20cm x 20 cm, I had to make those 2 margins wider than the other 2, OR I could start the print all over again. Perhaps I'll leave it as it is.

This is the final version of this piece, with the flowers and leaves painted in watercolour. The colours in this photo are a bit pale, it's actually a lot brighter than this.
 

A Bit of a Problem

Having painted all the colours of the flowers in the correct positions with careful lining up of the stencils, I discovered that the first screen print over the colours was pretty good. Unfortunately I chose the one copy where the flowers were bit high up on the picture plane for the first print, because it was all down hill after that! I'll probably hand colour the stems and leaves with a soft marker pen before declaring it finished.

I found that after the first screen print was done, the screen was so covered in black ink that I couldn't see the underlying paint to line it up properly, hence results like the one above! I would have to clean the screen after every pass if I wanted to line it all up perfectly. I can't just measure the paper and line up the screen, as each series of coloured 'blobs' is in a different place on the paper.  Silly me! Still, I only need one copy for this particular show, so even though it's not ideally placed, the one above will have to do.
 

Wonderful Patterns.

A walk in the park with the dog this morning was rewarded by a very happy dog, but also photos of some astonishingly patterned toadstools.

I suppose the white marks are from the top of the toadstool cracking, but I need to return to the park to take a few more photos, close ups this time.

Maybe I'll get there tomorrow, weather permitting. I do hope that it doesn't rain over night and turn the toadstool to mush!
 

My Mornin Walk.

Someone has a bit of imagination! How about these flower filled jeans up against a sunny wall?

There are various dragons on the ridges of old houses in my local area, but this one particularly caught my eye with it's belligerent expression. For some reason it looks to be a young dragon, so perhaps it's just scared up there on the roof. I love it's lichen covered scaly tail too.
 

Next Steps.

  By carefully lining up the previously burnt screen, I stenciled in the colours of the various flowers and the leaves in what I thought were the correct positions.

                       Here I've added the final flowers  all ready to overlay with the screen. Below is a print of the screen on it's own and I'm quite pleased with how it looks.

 Just for fun I hand coloured in the various flowers with alcohol inks, but the purples are all wrong, as
the colour on the ends of the pens do not reflect the actual colours of the inks!

Steps 1 and 2.

 Above is a selection of printed backgrounds for the new project. There were done on a gelatin plate with a piece of textured wallpaper that I had stuck to cardboard and sealed with shellac.

 The next step was to stencil the poppies, but looking at them here I can see that colours aren't much like the ones my original photo, but who is to know that, and does it really matter?

I wanted the colours to be pretty opaque, so that the background didn't show through, but as the final key stencil will be over the top of all the painting I don't think that a bit of show through texture will matter at all.

Stencil Cutting.

I thought that easiest way of adding specific colours to my image was to cut stencils for each area, the poppies, the nasturtiums and the nasturtium leaves. I printed the image onto Yupo paper, thinking that it would make a good stencil medium, but being so shiny, the ink didn't soak in, but rather it spread out from each line. It took 48 hours for the ink to be dry enough to cut out the shapes, and even then it smeared quite a lot, clearly visible in the lower paper. I outlined each section with red pen to make it easier to see what to cut out and that too smeared resulting in a rather messy looking image! I've marked the middle of each stencil to that I can line them up, I hope that it works out as I intend!

New Project.

 Walking past a neighbor's garden this week,  I couldn't but admire her wonderful display of Iceland poppies. You don't see them very often in private gardens these days, but these are so colourful that I just had to take a photo of them.

The colours reminded me of the colours of nasturtiums, so I decided to make some art combining the 2 types of flowers. The top paper is a design that I made with both the plants in it, and below is the small screen that I burnt on the Gocco machine of the original drawing. I think that I'll cut stencils so that I can print several different colours over the black outlines. More fun in store tomorrow!

More Walking Photos.

 I rather liked this painted letter box that I spotted on another of my daily walks. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make a very rustic metal letter box into something a bit more artistic!

These plants which I'm not sure what exactly they are, perhaps a type of Aloe, are showing off their extremely tall flower spikes in front of the old City Town Hall.