Plum Puddin'!

  (To read full post you may need to click blog title to view in your browser.)

This is another studio afternoon warm-up exercise. Once again, I started with an old art magazine -- often the paper is of exceptional quality -- and the images are inspiring company!

I cut down the pages to my standard 9x9-cm squares.

For a while I worked with Akua Kolor, the liquid version of ink developed for monotype work (now that Speedball has acquired the company it's called Akua Liquid Pigment). Didn't get the best of coverage and, like the thicker Akua Intaglio ink, it was going to take ages to dry.

I switched to acrylic paint and picked plums as my subject. I love the look of plums (they come in such a gorgeous array of colours, all the way from pale green to midnight indigo) plus their size and shape suited my small squares. Truth be told, I picked plums because I have a bunch of plum back-of-notecard labels needing to be used up.

I rolled up a small Plexi-glass plate with white paint and then used a chopstick to draw a loose sketchy plum -- sometimes I wiped out some of the white ink with a cotton swab and/or a small piece of cloth -- and pulled prints with the magazine squares.

The blue you see above is the colour of the Plexi-glass plate. And here's a tip -- a silicone baking sheet holds the plate secure for inking up -- AND -- resists ink so if the brayer goes off the plate there is very little cleanup!

I loved how bits of the underlying image would show. With happy accidents sometimes a perfect chit of colour would be revealed in a leaf or the curve of the plum. However, at day's end, I felt too much of the original magazine image was revealed and that the art work featured was recognizable.

Still, I played around with the prints anchoring them with a strip of paper. The cheery commercial polka dot papers on these two post cards made me feel happy! Then I tried some with my own hand-printed paper and a tiny bit of collage.

With one of the prints I was especially happy with how the image was obscured yet the revealed colours added so much to the print. Again, just the image popped onto a 5x7-inch card looked a bit lonely and unfinished.

I played around with different solutions and quite liked anchoring the print with a quick underlying roll of ink.

Apologies for the so-so quality of my photos -- overhead studio lighting is not the best. Hoping you can see the swatch of orange ink picked up the colour revealed in the leaf and carried it down through the composition.

The next time I was back in the studio I set about creating a background with similar colours to the magazine image. I printed this time with Akua Intaglio inks on some lightweight but robust calligraphy paper. Had to wait a few weeks for the squares to dry then had a go with the same plum monotype.

Sigh... A lot of work to get to this point and not achieve the images I'd imagined. But I'll keep tinkering -- thinking perhaps the backgrounds needed more variation. Or more wiping of the white ink. Not sure where this is leading but the journey, and pursuing an answer to the perennial question, "What if...", is exciting! See you soon.

Needs Must

 (To read full post you may need to click blog title to view in your browser.)

Mid-spring we had a few nights away. It was off-season and the lakeside resort was a tranquil retreat. Great view, lots of walking and good food!

I'd taken along a sketchbook and the most basic kit.

A water brush, ballpoint gel pen in black, and two water soluble Derwent brand pencils. Inktense in Ink Black and a Graphitone grey in medium wash. That was it. But on one of our many walks I gathered some dried plants. (I should add the Ponderosa Pine was already on the roadway. I didn't tear it off the tree.)

I felt drawn to try and print these. So needs must, as the old British saying goes. I had the two water soluble pencils and some leftover coffee! 

The only loose paper available was a tiny notepad. I took everything outside to the equally tiny balcony table. Submerging the plants in the coffee was a so-so success. Gave a bit of background colour but no definition. However, rubbing the grass heads with one of the pencils worked great!

Using the brush, I daubed the "inked" up seed head with a bit of water, pressed the ink-side down on the notepaper and covered with another piece of paper. Some judicious rubbing with a finger and there was a half-decent print. Alternating the grey and black pencils allowed for a bit of depth in the print.

When I got home, where I had more supplies, I used a grey stamp pad to ink up the leafy sage. 

I also dug out a chunky Lyra brand water-soluble graphite pencil. This worked great, offering up a rich, dark grey.

I don't know if you can tell by the photo below but rubbing the coloured pencils over the dried grasses really barked up the nibs. The Lyra graphite, on the other hand, is so robust and yields a ton of colour. The plan for further weekend jaunts is to toss a few of them in with my sketchbook. They come in varying degrees of intensity -- I've got a 2B, 6B and 9B, the one I used here.

A few twigs and leaves were the subject for a daily sketch and, again, I also used the graphite pencil  for  shading. The whitish areas in the photo below were done with natural clay picked up on one of our many holiday walks.

On a little aside, I do wonder if some other artist had also sat out on that tiny third-floor balcony, sketching or making something. Right at my chair, there lay a single stalk of dried grass. It was a bigger plume-y grass, not one of mine. And, unless a bird dropped it, the only way it got there was at the hand of a guest. So as a souvenir, I inked it up and printed it in my sketchbook.

Sitting on the balcony, working with these limited rudimentary supplies, was relaxing and satisfying. And who knows where it will lead. Might turn out to be simply a pleasant hour on holiday or I'll notice bits of graphite-printed plant material working it's way into some future project.