Printmaking, December 08 - January 09

Shall we begin with the Knight bird and infant (working title) the one with the bubbles mentioned in yesterdays post. I would have liked to enter it for a competition but couldn't with it being in that state and , at that point in time thought it was irrepairable (sp?) although I have not finished the amendments to it so I can not say conclusively .....we shall see ! Can you see the BUBBLES !!??

This is a real life behind the scene affair because of what I am going to say i.e., the working title for the next print is " Meat Tray Experiment"!! It all goes back to Christmas when I decided to buy a ready made roast beef joint for us to enjoy. It came in a sturdy high walled metallic tray, probably thick aluminium foil. I cut the base out and thought it might come in useful to try to do some print stuff with.

I wrote on it with a 'biro' and then inked it up as per intaglio and to my surprise it worked. I placed various other collagraph plates and a hard ground copper plate there too. The string to tie it all together. I rubbed and rubbed the string in tissue paper so that it wouldn't be too soggy with ink, because I know from experience that this can be a problem. It was 'borderline' but I think it's just about OK. I made more of an effort with wiping the individual little elements as it was a monotone piece, using "q-tips" and soft tissue paper hankies.

Next the saline etch text plate, the writing on it was inscribed through a traditional hard ground, as so far, it's the best thing to work, I have found, for the process. (Far too many commas!!..... oh well). Saline etch is something I want to go back to - to experiment with more. I used offset of tinfoil and 'chine-colle inkjet' and the little 'crittur' is hard ground etched copper. And of course the red string offset - oh I do love my string !........ I just have a thing for it...cotton string. Just the thing in itself makes me happy.

Ta dah !! this Stitches print work is currently on exhibition in SYMMETRY an exhibition being presented at the Original Print Gallery in Dublin, Ireland It is additionally ( had to make another one!) on exhibition in a gallery in Leipzig, Germany. I say "tah dah" because it's one of the pieces that I have had a strong connection with out of the pieces I have made over the past few months. I made a smaller version of it which I submitted to the 7th British International Miniprint (full sordid details on my print studio blog ).

It was also made into an edition of prints on china paper for the inkteraction portfolio exchange that Melanie Yazzie invited me to participate in. Those prints had the red stitching too. I received the invite cards to the opening which is being held at the London Print Studio Gallery soon. I notice that Beauvais Lyon has his prints in an exhibition currently showing there which is linked to Darwin. It being his anniversary at the moment. I liked his works that were in our exhibition in Dalarnas in Falun Sweden also. (Grafic Biennial) They are seemingly real creatures although on further inspection are of a hybrid nature. Beauvais was in the book "Printmaking at the Edge" along with me and 43 other artists from around the World. Although a lot of them were from the USA.

The final print shown here is Rainbow House which I actually made to submit to the Wrexham Print International but it wasnt the one they selected - typical !!! and after all my trouble BUT ...it doesn't matter a bit because I really like it. In actual fact it got selected in any event for the No Toxico exhibition in Mexico There doesn't seem to be any images of the other artists in this exhibition which is so disapointing (sp?) !! in the age of the internet as we can't all 'make it' to Monterrey in Neuvo Leon, down Mexico way.!! Never mind there will be a catalog and hopefully I should be able to scan some images from that and show some of the pieces by the other selected participating artists. I really like to see what other people have done. They also selected Rainbow House in the Leipzig exhibition so I had to make a second version of that. It wasn't quite as lovely as the first one but I did my best. I also didnt really want to have 2 exactly the same.

Actually talking of scans and catalogs - I made a few scans from the excellent catalog that I am in through being selected for the Guanlan International Print exhibition and I MUST make a post about that. Such beautiful and excellent work I am honored to be amongst them.

Further Recent Printmaking in my Studio

Here I am last minute when I should be getting off to bed and gawd knows I am so exhausted from re organizing the studio all day with the fabulous help of my beloved C. He was doing mostly everything and I was helping as much as I possibly could.

The first print is of a web made of words using pencil on paper which was scanned into Photoshop and manipulated. This was then silk screened onto. I soaked it in the paper bath and then put it through the press with a hard ground spider on copper. It
still needs something more?


Next is the very tall queen of the Rabbit people, who I made this hard ground copper etching of and then have never used her or featured her, before in a print. So Ithought it was high time she came out of the copper elements drawer.

I printed her on to a mono printed background. Additionally I offset the red house using this kind of spongy stuff which I picked up ages ago in a haberdashery shop. It's a bit like the stuff they make those Spontex cleaning cloths for wiping the kitchen surfaces. I am always losing it around the studio - it's like it has a life of its own and some days it just can't face going through the press. This one is also still under development I need to place some chine colle onto the red house to 'knock it back' because as it stands its too dominant .

Next is the orange print - the first one I think that I have ever done. I think it was meant to be a warm red - but whatever - I quite like it as it is. It has offset organic material and also a tiny bit of silk screened blue text on China paper. Some chine colle, inkjet visual elements, are also included.

Yep it's got all sorts of processes in it. The main background is from an etch
on steel which I did ages ago and wasn't too pleased with. Don't know if we
have the mordant at FDPW for me to work on it further. Mind you the plates
a bit heavy for me, to carry around the workshop but I will ask when I am next
there. I was planning on going in tomorrow but after all the additional
exertions of today with re organizing the studio I can tell already that the
pain in my back is murder so I will see how I feel in the morning. Mind you
I always feel like I have been in a car crash on surfacing



OK it's now Tuesday evening and yeah I did feel pretty rotten this morning but not horrendously so -- just a case of gradually warming up my bones/ motor faculties (something like that). The studio reorganization was continued much of today and I de stapled a few more of the canvases from my MA show. This was held, wait for it (!!) all the way back in 1993, in Winchester School of Art. " !!.......Blast it" those staple removers, or rather the process of doing it, really messes up your fingers/ thumbs...... ugh how I hated doing that but it's good to get rid of stuff and minimize the amount of stuff we have to 'stash' all around the house. Even though there are only the two of us humans living in an allegedly four bedroomed house there's still, no way, enough room for us all !! ( forgot the two kats mind you they only have themselves i.e., no clutter) bless um!!.
I have only kept the ones that I still like - that are, in my mind, up to scratch. C. did remark at one point - I think it was yesterday he said this..."why you could'nt have thrown these out while we still living in London ?? i.e., before we packed all this stuff up to move house up to Scotland etc etc.

But you know what...... I was'nt ready to do that, at the time. You have to be ready to throw stuff out. Whether that be clothes, house clutter or certainly your artwork or even a boyfriend. Have'nt done that for a while - cant say I have enjoyed it when I have. One person decided that they could'nt live without me and phoned to let me know that they were going to do terrible physical damage to themselves but as much as I felt terribly sad for his painful state of mind.....I could'nt make myself have deeper feelings for him than I had. We should have stayed at the friendship level and not moved it up a gear but that had been what he had wanted and I had liked him so very much . He really used to make me laugh so much, he had such a lively mind and and he was an artist as well. I guess he was crazy about me. In more ways than one.
Anyway I digress but I have often wondered how he is and how his life has turned out.


Next print is an inkjet with collagraph of little rabbit fetus images on it. I need to do some more collagraph impressions onto it, of those, that have stronger lines in particular. I have thrown some of those that are too feint away and will remake some using modelling paste spatula' ed onto some mount card and then inscribed into. I did one like that using text onto modelling paste and it worked out really well.

Last but not at all least is the etching (well it was in the beginning !) knight bird with found baby. The etch seemed to wear off and so to keep it proofing satisfactorily I had to drypoint most of the marks. I am wondering now if I put it in the saline etch. Yeah course I did - I did it here. It's on an aluminium plate.

The reason it's posted here again on the blog (I made it as part of the previous batch of prints) is because the chine colle (lime green coloured) had 'bubbles' in it. Horror of horrors - I was most annoyed with my 'cak-handedness'. what a wally. That's because of rushing or it may have been that I was tired and not paying attention.
One thing I have done since then is to squirt all the rice paste which I purchased from Intaglio Printmakers London, into a glass jar. This really was as a consequence of this print 'buggering up'. In it's original container it was coming out of the yellow plastic tube like a big fat tube length of toothpaste. Some how I was'nt spreading it correctly onto the paper to be chine-colled and that's how come the print was insufficiently pasted, first time round. So now I use a brush and sometimes also will use the side of an old credit card if it's a large area to be applied to the paper. What I did with this particular print, was to slit open the bubble areas with a scalpel (I kind of felt like a surgeon too doing that) and poke the small paste brush in, with great care. That was 'air' in those bubbles !!. Now it looks a lot better and I just need to touch it up slightly further with a tiny bit more of the lime green paper and rub it with the back of a spoon. Very high tech I am very !!

Recent Printmaking Activity

This is a few of the prints from my last batch of printmaking. There was another batch ( sound like a baker) before this one done around Christmas. I have been meaning to post to the blog but then get distracted with getting on with the printmaking itself.

Will post a proper catch up in next few days.

Another thrilling installment on Printmaking....

as in ........how not to do it.....one can but try !!!

Here's the print

Yeay as I said ....here's one of the prints I finally entered for the British miniprint 2011.

On reflection I think it didn't have enough variation of tone ( which is never my strongest point !!)

I made it using a pre rocked mezzotint plate that I purchased from Intaglio Printmakers in London.
An 18 x 20 cm plate is listed on there as costing £82.00 .......which I think must be a mistake.  Because the ones I bought a few years ago were about £15  each I seem to remember.  I still have two of them I must have felt a bit more well off then because I wouldn't buy something like that now.
What's ironic is that after spending ages making two of the 3 miniprints  I submitted  - I then put in another miniature version of a print I had already done but of which I none the less was very fond of ..

Its called Obdurate Heart and is about homelessness or being stateless ( as in being a refugee)  I had to do 32 attempts to get the colour and size etc printed out correctly - don't let anyone kid you, that inkjet print is an easy option...........

Anyway it was this one the pinkie - that got selected and not the other two which I had spent ages working on.  The catalogue which they made to accompany the exhibition wasn't  too bad I think you can download it as a PDF if you are interested in seeing all the works that were selected to be in the show.
http://www.7thminiprint.com/

Two Collagraph Courses Feb and March 2009

Information re courses being taught by Clare Yarrington.

Please click on image to see full screen version with full info about the course.