Week 6 at the Curwen

This was another day on photo screenprinting. First a cup cake print from last week.

This is quite appropriate, as Sue Jones our tutor has nick named us the cake group - we do seem to need cake and sweets to keep our energy levels up!!

I played around with different colours:

I don't know what got in that photo!! I love screen printing, it's fast once all the preparation of the screen is done and it's great trying out different colour combinations. Another fun day!! Such fun that I sneaked in on an extra day at the weekend - Open Access and more photo screen.

This is my 'tea' image, drawn on truegrain like the cup cake print. I printed it in some great colours.

              I also printed some plain backgrounds on another screen to overprint next week. It was an interesting day with some stone lithography going on, which I'd never seen before. I find printmaking fascinating, with all the different processes that are involved.

Open access day

On Friday I did an extra day at the Curwen http://www.curwenprintstudy.co.uk/ ; there was a collagraph course taking place with 4 people, so room for me to do some lino printing. I overprinted the 2nd colour on several shoe prints which worked well and did some more printing on to maps. This is some pieces of an aerial view I cut up so I could place them in different positions.

I love the green of this mapping print; it's printed on a French map. The roads make an interesting pattern. I also printed my other aerial view in some new colours; I like the grey and yellow.

I  printed some paler grey backgrounds and some lime green ones for future use, also this honesty lino cut.

A busy, successful day; I achieved all I wanted to do, a rare event! I was also pretty exhausted, it's quite a work out on the press!



Open Access Day

On Friday I was booked to do an open access day at the Curwen; after the somewhat frustrating day on Tuesday with my wren prints I was looking forward to making progress with the aerial view. I cut away parts of the lino key block to allow the 2nd colour to print on it's own, rather than over the 1st colour. Normally, the key block would be the darkest colour, printed last. I did it the other way round.

I had intended to print the 1st colour as a lime green with the 2nd colour as red, the third a blue. Instead I mixed a lovely grey as the main colour with red as the 2nd. I like the grey and red together.

I then overprinted the blue, with a transparent ink that I mixed. I don't like the colours particularly, but was thinking the sky and river should be blue! I didn't ink up evenly enough, finding that the transparent ink behaves differently from the opaque inks. So a bit of an experiment and a lot learnt!

Of course the beauty of the key block system is that I have the 3 blocks to play with, using different colour combinations; so lots of fun ahead!