another illusion

... of a seascape.

Freire, WIP, monotype, 24x50cm on Tosa Shi paper

other than the water to clean my printing tools with, there hasn't been any water in sight of my artmaking over the last months. i am busily working away on another round through fields in the landscape. chilean ones, this time. while the main project is in a lemon yellow/orange/cyan palette, i wanted a counterpart to be much more sombre, autumn-haze like. and oops, it looks i ended up with something else altogether.

the print is a build of two layers of raw umber, one dark purple grey and a light blue grey on top. they are markings with a knife on an inked up sheet of perspex. much of the effect is in fact due of the paper - it's a very fibrous japanese paper with a lot of the inking sinking into it. so while the top layers where in fact rather light and opaque, they sunk into the previous (still wet) umber layers and neutralised the value contrast considerably.

there's a lino layer to go on top as in this one here, but i think i will leave this one print as it is - the illusion of a seascape at night.

this is the end of this particular printing project and i have written up some more on the process here, if you are interested

A star in the east

No, not another Christmas story.  This star is a sea star that I found on Middle Cove beach today.

We've had a couple of days of wild weather which whipped up the seas and sent waves crashing up the cliffs to the tree line.  It was too wet and windy to try to get photos yesterday so early this morning I bundled up and went down to the beach in Flatrock, Torbay and Middle Cove to watch the water and take some photos.

This little sea star was ripped from its ocean bed and placed on the beach, overlooked by seagulls and crows luckily.  I immediately thought - gyotaku printing! and the little fellow came home with me.

I've played around with prints on several papers, including watercolour, card, print paper and tissue.  I will continue to experiment over Christmas to see what I can come up with.  I rather like the effect on tissue paper and recall seeing some experimentation with a sort of collage technique using tissue and printing over it.  I just need to remember where I saw it!

I put a slideshow on my blog of some of the photos that were taken today and will try for a video once I can get it uploaded.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone and the best of new years.

Sketch, print, draw... and repeat...

I've been moving between drawing and printmaking back and forth rather frequently since I first sketched the pond reflections. While I find it difficult to prepare linocuts meticulously, I nonetheless find moving between different media is helping me clarify composition, marks and value.

It is something that always intrigued me since I saw Otto Mueller's and other members of the Bruecke's woodcuts done on site in 1910s Dresden - the angular shapes of his, Schmidt-Rotluff and other's figures fascinated me, and once I had realised that part of their painting form was so strongly influenced by their woodcutting practice, I was curious to examine more closely how one medium's specific qualities and limitations can inform another medium and vice versa.

A page from my printmaking notebook.

I was compiling the material for the printmaking course I'm doing, and realised that I had done precisely that - not with nudes on the lakes in the surroundings of Dresden, but with the two scenes of pond reflections.

Pond reflections in Colour,
Soft pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

While the linocuts were done soon after the original plein air sketches [see my earlier post on one of them here], I then went back to delve a bit more into Wolf Kahn's Colorist palette and work with pastel, my favourite medium, in a different way: to draw rather than paint with the pastel sticks and to work on white paper (both things I had 'left behind' rather quickly when I stumbled into working with soft pastels).

Trees on Water, Monotype 2
20x15cm, Tosa Shi paper

From these pastel drawings I went back to printmaking - not relief cuts this time but monotypes in colour and monochrome. In colour first, using some of Kahn's favourite hues (notably cadmiums and ultramarine), and then to try monochromatic prints with a lot of wiping away, adding again,... to develop the composition further and see what abstractions it may yield.

Trees on Water, Monotype 4
20x15 cm, Tosa Shi paper

I am now going back to the next relief print - it's a different scene: there's no water in there, unfortunately, but have a look here for the first round of sketches and monotypes.

If you want to read up on my exploration of Kahn's palette and drawing marks: this tag assembles my blog's posts on Kahn.

The waterways project so far

The waterways project so far ........

As the weather gets warmer (my arthritis doesn't like this cold :>( ) I want to get a lot more work done on this project. It was always intended to be a slow burn project but it's a little too slow burn at the moment!

The beautiful huge willows that overhang the water in the charcoal sketch of the 15C packhorse bridge are now the sad pollarded stumps of the lino prints and pastel. Though interesting to draw, the landscape is poorer for their loss. I know they will grow again but it will be a long time before they regain their beauty.

So far I've only looked at Aylestone Meadows, the canal marina at Market Harborough and countryside nearby and the city centre with its old factories and weirs.

I've looked at aerial views thanks to mapslive.com and I'm interested in taking them further at some stage. They show you the context - how the bridges and rivers, canals and streams relate to each other.

In the Charnwood Forest area are old slate quarries, now flooded and surrounded by trees that I want to look at soon. Rocks and depth and craginess - something quite different from the tranquil canal.

update: link to oldest fossil found in that area in really ancient rock

So many things I want to do - I just need the time.

Fish printing - gyotaku

Capelin print

5.5 x 7 ink

Last week Robyn Sinclair sent me a link about fish printing. I'd never heard of it before and was fascinated by the process. This Japanese method of creating prints from a real fish is called gyotoku. Gyotaku basically means 'fish rubbing' in Japanese. The fish prints (commonly called fish rubbings) are the mirror image of one side of the fish, each characteristic of the fish is recorded - every scale and fin's reflection is transferred to the paper.

The most popular form of Gyotaku fish art is called the direct method. The fish print is created by rubbing a piece paper on the side of an inked fish. The fish eye is painted by hand after the rubbing is made. Only a few high quality prints can be made from each fish and each fish prints is unique.

Living on an island you'd think it would be easy to find a fish, wouldn't you? Not quite so, at least on a Sunday. You can read about that on my blog.

Despite not having the appropriate fish to hand, I made do with what I did have and tried a couple of prints tonight and have to say that, even though there is a distinct fishy smell in my studio, I love the results and the possibilities are endless for this process.

Here is the little capelin having been inked. I used a brush to apply the ink and I figured a brayer would just squash him into oblivion. I then experimented with a few types of paper. I had a lightweight print paper, almost translucent but found that it absorbed too much moisture and blurred the belly of the fish. The secret seems to be to wrap or gently mold the paper around the fish to get a print. Perhaps I was a little heavy handed on the first couple of tries.

Next I used Somerset printing paper and that worked beautifully, if not a little difficult to press against the fish as it was much heavier.

My final paper was a scrap of yupo which turned out better than I anticipated, but a little paler than the others.

Despite the lack of fish quality, it worked in my favour in some ways. The fish curves make it alive even in death, mimicking the movement through water.

Capelin print on Yupo

Its ice fishing season and I'd like to get a little trout to experiment with and once I can get the time to get to the market, I'll find some other fish to practice with. Meanwhile I will be adding other mediums and colours to some of these prints to see what I can come up with. A lovely mottled watercolour background perhaps or one of the sheets of that lovely handmade journal that I bought.

Experiments are such fun, even if The Other One thinks that I've lost it when he asked what on earth I was doing to the fish.

Water so dark so still

Water so dark so still
Linocut on blotting paper
20x15cm

Colours intersected by water
a surface so still that
it seems to reveal all there is

Look, can you not see?
All that there is
to marvel at

Clear lines long lines
unbroken
until
a breeze lifts
barely to hear
it lets the lake move
it breaks the lines
hides the trees

And nothing remains.

Check my blog for more info on the printmaking project here

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

The title of this post is from the Dr Seuss book of the same name and it kept running through my head as I did this printing process. But aside from having fish and colours in it, it has little to do with this post.

The aquatic theme still finds its way into my work and here into Watermarks. This stylized fish was from an old piece that I had done years ago and now translated into a lino print.

I've been looking longingly at lino printing for awhile and decided that it was about time to plunge in. The full process from design to print can be read on my blog, Illustrated Life and today I have played around with some more colours and papers to see what I could come up with.

My next experiment will be to add other colour or texture to the pieces after they have dried. Right now they are being printed on 9 x 6 sheets of anything from plain old sketch paper to Somerset and this black smooth paper which I can't remember the name of.

So what have I learned from this so far?

1. Choose your design carefully. It needs to be something that translates easily to lines and value blocks. I'm sure you can create something as complicated as you like, but I think that less is often more.

2. Think 10 times and cut once! Deciding on what will be printed with ink and what will be cut away can be a challenge as you're working in reverse, almost a negative effect. I found some thumbnail sketches trying out various values works well to give me a good idea of what looks good or not.

3. Have the right tools - or close to it. In my need for instant gratification, I accessed most of the tools I wanted locally but not all of them. While my final prints didn't turn out too badly, some finer gouges and a baren would have helped, as well as access to a broader selection of lino blocks. Thank heaven for mailorder!

4. Research. Despite my need for instant gratification, I did take time over the past week to do a lot of reading on lino printing and watched a lot of videos on the process. It really makes a difference to me to have both written words to reference and the visuals of watching someone actually completing the process.