Christmas Open Studio

I had a lovely weekend welcoming people to my Open Studio event. The mulled wine went down well, especially the non-alcoholic version, made from red grape juice, orange juice, brown sugar, grated ginger and cloves and a cinnamon stick. It had oranges and lemons cut up and thrown in as well; I was sipping away most of the day, with no ill effects afterwards!! I thoroughly enjoyed talking about my work -much of the time us artists are working on our own; it's great to share with other people.

I've never had a picture of me at my OS, Gina took this one and below we have Gina and her Mum.

On Saturday December 3rd I will be at Ashwell Christmas Fair, held in the beautiful church. There's always a lovely Christmassy feel to this fair and being local you see lots of people you know, so a warm, friendly atmosphere.

I am currently working on a lino cut to commemorate my grandson's birth. He is now 18 months old so a little late but I recently took a commission to create a lino cut for a child's christening, on their 1st birthday and thought I must create a print for Barney.

Here's the start of the design and work in progress.....

I've a printing day booked at the Curwen in December, at present I'm having withdrawal symptoms .. no printing for weeks!!

Alison Hullyer, a Cambridge artist, printmaker and illustrator now has a blog as well as her website - do take a look at her lovely, distinctive work. I first met Alison at her Open Studio in 2010, when I had just started my printmaking journey. When I try to add a link to Alison's blog, my post won't save, so do look her up!

Curwen exhibition

I am back online after weeks without my laptop, which sadly crashed completely, no hope of resurrection! So here I am on brand new laptop, getting used to it and catching up on everything. All because I have a wonderful IT guru, my son in law Mark who set up my new laptop and is always patient with his Mum in law!!

So much has happened in the last month. My printmaking course has ended and we held our end of course exhibition at the Curwen on July 12th. The day before was hectic,cleaning the floor!!! and setting up our boards.

 My boards are nearly ready.

On the Tuesday it was assessment time with Stanley Jones and Chloe Cheese, we each had half an hour with them to show and discuss our work. It was a very positive and helpful experience although slightly nerve wracking; eminent printmakers with years of experience looking at my prints!! At the end of the day we were presented with our cerificates; I passed The Advanced Printmakers Certificate with merit, that was exciting!

The evening exhibition was a big success, with lots of visitors.

including my grandson and daughter....

........of course, he really enjoyed all the prints..........an art lover in the making!!

Actually, he was more interested in crawling around, a new skill he had just discovered!!



Week 1

I am currently taking the Advanced Printmaking course at The Curwen Print Study Centre following successfully completing the Certificate course last term; along with 7 other people. It is a super place to work with talented tutors. We have all continued this term and are a lovely group, even though I say it myself!! This term is 10 weeks long and the first 2 weeks were traditional etching with Valerie Sims BA; a completely new process for me - and a highly complicated one!!

The 1st week was learning about etching onto a zinc plate using hard and soft ground, the preparation of which took a long time, working through the stages with Valerie's guidance. The previous evening I drew some asparagus before I ate it - I used the sketch as my starting point. By the middle of the afternoon I had printed my very first ever etching - of asparagus using hard ground.

I then stopped out the spears, applied soft ground to the background, put it though the press with some tissue paper on top, then back into the acid.  I like the mottled background. I'm quite proud of the finished result, which you can see below.

 Etching is an interesting process and I have enormous respect for artists producing beautiful etchings. The photo below shows me getting  a workout on the etching press!!



The next photo shows the zinc plate I produced.