Blue Tongue Lizard.

Unfortunately this large Blue Tongue lizard had been killed on the road, well just an unmade bush track really that has very little traffic in a day.  Somehow this poor lizard was run over, I do hope that someone wasn't idiotic enough to do it deliberately. I just loved the pattern on the back of the animal.

Another Idea.

 I thought that the stamped images on the fabric were too indistinct, so I decided to go back over most of them with my original hand carved stamps and a darker colour.  It was quite difficult to line up the images on the fabric with the stamps, but I managed to get it pretty close in all but one case.

Here I thought that I might try to line up parts of the spirals in the sun prints with the circular edges of the stamps, then I could carry the stitching through from background to foreground.......maybe.

More Spiral Play

 I printed out a copy of a possible background on A3 paper and rather liked the different colours that appeared, the various shades of blue, but I lost a lot of that when I printed it out again onto A3 treated fabric, seen in the two images  below.

 I quite like the contrast between the orange background and the sepia spiral designs, but I'm not at all sure which bits to place where. I want to machine outline most of the background designs before placing anything on top, so I have a lot of time to continue playing.

      I wonder what the purple images would look like on the orange background....hmmm.....

Still Playing with the Gelli Plate.

 

                       I'm still playing around with the Gelli plate and my hand carved stamps.
I always had trouble with my home made gelatine plate seeming to dry out the acrylic paints, partly because of the warm weather that we've been having but even in the cool weather I was having trouble. I decided to try some 'Drying Retarder' and what a difference that makes!

    The acrylic paint stays nice and wet and I only need just a few drops to make the difference.
   I'm thinking of using these mono-prints as a sort of background to the more definite sun-prints, rather than the solid black or purple that I've been trying out recently. More play necessary!

 

Watch Out!

Luckily it was a cool windy morning, so it was unlikely that the snakes were about. This is only about 7km from the centre of Melbourne!

Waste not Want not!

 Another Gelli print with my hand carved stamps and the commercial stencil, but this time I also
used a collage plate made out of all the fine bits of off-cuts of 'rubber' from when I originally carved the stamps. Needless to say, I've fiddled with the colours a bit in Photoshop.

The original plate above, and a Photoshop inverted image below. 

Gelli Plate Printing.

 I thought that I would try out my new stamps on the Gelli Plate, but I didn't have much success, as it was such a warm day and the paint kept on drying up too quickly.

                       This isn't too bad, but it's just part of a larger one that was pretty awful!

 

             Here I also used a commercial stencil that seemed to fit the theme as well as the stamps.

                       The one above I really like.....it's a computer colour inversion of the one below.

         Not much of the stamp is visible, just a piece of one of the smaller ones on the lower right.
                   Oh well, one good print for a couple of hours work isn't too bad I suppose.

Cutting Stamps.

 I wanted to cut some stamps based on the images in my sun prints, so here are the first efforts, sort of O.K. but not that good overall. The leaf shape is fairly clear to see in the print, but the circular stamps are based on the inner most circle of the spiral, not so easy to spot.

The stamps themselves mounted temporarily on Perspex with double sided tape. The largest one is 7.5 com across.