What a Clever Bird!

 

Spotted in the corner of the garage on a shelf is this lovely little bird's nest.

 

On closer inspection there are just 2 black and white speckled eggs lying on the soft dry grass in the                                                                         bottom of the nest.

 

Rust.

 On a recent trip to the country I took a walk around an abandoned property and found all sorts of items rusting away in the grass and around the old house. Inspiration for future art perhaps.

 

More Plant Experiments.

I noticed buttercups flowering outside the back fence of a neighbour's property, so I used some of those leaves, plus a print from a buttercup flower. It was too difficult to get a good print from the fragile petals of the actual flower, so I used my hand carved stamps for the other flowers. Stamps were also used for the various insects. I noticed yesterday that the neighbour had unfortunately poisoned the buttercups, so no more prints from them!

                          Various leaves used from my garden and another butterfly stamp.

 

New Project.

I'm not quite sure why, but I suddenly changed tack recently to printing with fresh foliage instead of dried plant material. I also decided that I needed to show the roots of the plants rather than having them sprouting randomly from the bottom of the page. This necessitated pulling up plants and washing off the roots, so I started out with vegetable seedlings from my garden, beetroot, spinach and lettuce.

I love the colour that these beetroot seedlings turned out to have, with the blending of red and green paints directly on to the gelatine plate.

                                  A couple of layers here, with the beetroot and some grass.

Grass, spinach, beetroot, carrot and another grass plant which didn't show up very well. I just love how some of the roots show up and I'm enjoying this new direction. I can see how addictive it might become!

Variations on a Theme.

For some reason I decided not to go ahead with using any more stencils, but to try out another couple of ideas that I had. Being confined to the house with Covid gives plenty of time for artwork, which is excellent as far as I'm concerned!

Variations on a theme, but this one above is my favorite, I like the colours and the way the various grasses printed. The butterfly is one of my hand carved stamps.

                                  I'm not sure about the large bird at the left on this one.

The pale grey isn't as prominent on the actual print as it shows here and it looks better as a result.

Yet another version of moon, vegetation and wildlife, all printed on my home made gelatine plate.

Positive & Negative.

 After I had cut out the latest stencil, shown in my previous post and on the left in the photo below, I suddenly thought to take out all the pieces of cardboard that I had thrown in the bin and glue them onto a plate which I can press it into a gelatine plate for an image, the reverse of the stencil. I'm not sure if the pieces have enough height to work well, but nothing ventured, nothing gained!

Road Works.

 I spotted this network of cracks in the surface of a local road while out walking the dog. I thought that the pattern was fascinating and I wondered what had made it crack in just that way.

              I traced off the design from the photo and ended up with this pattern of lines above.

 In Photoshop I then added a more lines to change it into a rectangular shape and enlarged it to an A4 format, (30cm x 21cm) Now to cut it out as a stencil!

Above is the cut out stencil, which is going to be hard to work with as it's so fragile. After a few uses the left over paint on the cardboard will add some stability to the thin lines, but for now it will be handled with care!

More Stencilled Prints.

 Having recently put aside a pile of gelatine plate prints that needed more layers, I finally got them all out yesterday and started to add the new stencil work to them. They do still need final focal points, but I really like these ones shown below.