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.

Addictive?

 Cutting stencils is becoming an addictive past time! I haven't even used this one below in art work yet, but it was fun to design and to cut it out. I think that I probably make all my stencils a bit too busy, but I can always remove bits later on if that's the case. They are A4 size, 21cm x 30 cm. which is one of the reasons why I don't like commercial stencils, they are too small and I like my art to be all my own work.

 

Stencils Again.

 After a short diversion with the collagraph, I designed and cut another stencil based on the original curled vine photo. Below is the stencil and one of the resulting prints.

I love the blue and orange together, and leaving some of the area white appeals, but over all I think that it might just be too busy. I suppose that it depends on what I do next with it however.

Challenge

It's been quite a long while since I constructed a collagraph plate, so it was interesting to get back into it recently in response to a challenge put out by the tutor of an online class that I did some time ago. The challenge was to use packaging materials to make a plate and to print it.  I used some expanding brown packing paper, the bottom of a take away container and some very small 'useless' cake papers to construct my plate.

I don't have a proper printing press, so I used my cold press laminator. However I soon found that I didn't have enough contrast between the textures, so I either got a very dense or very light print. The one below is of course the light one.

          I rather liked the look of the plate after the printing as it retained some of the black ink. (below)

After a bit of thought I decided not to try for a better print but to enhance the light one with water-colours, and I'm happy that I did as I rather like the result.