A Morning in the Botanic Gardens, the Birds on the Lake.

                                               Beautiful Black Swan amongst the vegetation.

         A Female Native Wood Duck. These ducks also roost in trees which looks quite odd!

                                         The female Wood Duck with her 3 male companions.
 

                                                     Also a juvenile Dusky Moorhen.

More Stencil Cutting.

       

 I really like the idea of arches to work with on the gelatine plate, so this is the next arch themed stencil.

 I used an old print with stamped random alphabet letters on the base layer, with another stamped layer of small print and various household items over that, with the stencil as the last layer. I feel that it still needs some sort of focal point, but not being sure exactly what, I'll leave it for now.

Hand Cut Stencils.

 I find that it's very rewarding to cut my own stencils, time consuming yes, but I'm much happier to work with stencils that I have made myself rather than using commercial stencils all the time.

This is a selection of 'twisted' leaf stencils that I cut recently. I actually started with cutting some very much bigger than these, but I quickly realised that they were far too big for the size of my home made gelatine printing plate.

This print above also uses another couple of stencils that I cut, but although I don't like the overall effect at this stage, the leaves turned out well.

This print was made over an earlier one that I wasn't happy with, it's better, but still not something that I'd keep at this stage.

This one above I was happy with and so I added my hand carved moth stamps to it. I'm really pleased with the 'twisted' leaf' stencils and will try to cut just one size smaller if I can for future use.