Meadowhead Finished

After a short break I finished Meadowhead this morning.

A couple of days ago I mixed up a dark reddish colour and rolled this over the bottom half of the lino plate.  I wiped some of the pigment away from the miner's coat area as I didn't want it to disappear entirely into the darkness.  This gave a more gentle feeling of something disappearing into shadow rather than a harsh linear delineation of the coat, which I didn't want.

This morning I dabbed a little blue on the plate over the edges of the butterfly wings and then printed from this.  I used a small paintbrush to apply the ink to the plate.

Then I cut away some of the miner's coat and cut into the roots and the darkness around him to give a feeling of depth and layering then brushed over a blue with extender added to it in the area around the miner's head and the remaining defining lines of his jacket.  I used a small square brush to apply blue onto the plate then printed from this.  I really didn't want to get any blue on the upper meadow area of the print as I wanted the contrast to be as great as possible between subterranean darkness and brilliant sunny summer meadow.

The finished print, 'Meadowhead'.

I had quite a bit of the blue left when I had finished, so I added a little red and white to produce a kind of subtle grey.  I printed 2 prints from what remained of my linoplate from this.  Cut into it a little more to leave just the most basic of lines, and rollered a darker version of this pale grey pigment over the bottom half of the plate to produce this monochrome image.

When it is dry I will do 'something' else to it, not sure what yet, to give it some kind of completion.  I think it will make a nice complementary pair to my main edition of 10 prints of the miner emerging into, or thinking about, his wildflower meadow.

Meadowhead Printing Day 3

I've made considerable progress on Meadowhead today.

Here are some of the stages my print has gone through...

Printed red, which immediately added drama to the composition.  I want there to be a feeling of blood in the dark earth, blood of the earth and of the life within it.

The life force within the earth and the lives of those who go down inside it to mine what what has died and become precious within it, be that 'black diamond' or other substances mankind mines for profit.

To lighten the butterfly (I've modelled it very loosely on a Red Admiral, because I've been visited by a particularly frenetic one in my back garden these past 2 weeks) and to put a little more vibrant sunshine into the meadow, I printed an opaque yellow in areas of the top half of the print - I applied the ink to the plate using a brush because a roller would not give me the definition I required.

A more dramatic addition is the green I added both in the grasses above and down into the subterranean darkness where plant roots reach for nutrition and where the miner toils at his work.

Finally for today I have added a second darker red in the lower areas of the print, this gives more definition to the miner's features, also I have overprinted the lower green areas to darken the green/soil areas and to start pushing back a background area around the miner's face.

That's probably going to be it for today.  Partly because the paper is saturated with ink - although the ink that I use is fast drying, it is still sticky with the layers I've printed today.  I'm also tired.  To be honest, cutting and printing repeatedly takes its toll on me, both physically and mentally.  I know that sounds wimpy, but at this moment, although I really want to carry on with this print, in my head I've had enough of it!!!  

Hopefully I'll be fresher in my head when the ink has dried on the paper. 

Lilac and White

I've made a little more progress on Meadowhead today.

I added lilac to the flower heads and continued this colour down over the miner's eyes as I want to start building up a feeling of shadow and solidity in the lower half of the picture.  It's going to be mainly red to black in the bottom half, but I thought a few lilac lines around the eyes and forehead might give it a transitional zone where the daylight is breaking through the subterranean gloom.

I like the way the eyes are appearing peering up from the gloom.

I carved a little more out of the plate intending to add the red next, and then I realised that I had missed one of the flowers which should have also been printed lilac.  So I re-printed another shade of lilac and also, while I was at it, added a little white on the butterfly wings.  I added the colour to the plate using 2 small paintbrushes, one for lilac and one for white.  I marked the back of the print lightly with 2 pencil circles to show where I would have to rub to transfer the ink from the plate, and then printed...

I make a few notes when I create reduction linocut prints to organise my thoughts as to what order I need to cut and print each colour layer in.  As this print is building in quite a complex way (I'm really printing in 2 halves: green and red/black, above and below ground) so my notes are a bit more involved.  And (like train timetables) subject to changes...

Meadowhead

It's been over a year since I posted last, and during that time I've worked on my pen and ink drawings, exhibited some, been awarded a Prize and sold a few.  I've been very fortunate there.  

I continued producing ACEOs (small playing card sized works of art) to sell on Ebay.  I sold these via auction quite regularly for a while and it was a good experience as it helped me find a professional way of selling my art, something that took courage on my part, and also something that I should have attempted to do many years ago.  

Earlier this year, I don't know why, but I dug out some lino cutting materials I bought about 3 years ago from a shop that isn't there anymore (where have all the art shops gone?  To that shop heaven called 'on-line').  I made a linocut of artist Frida Kahlo and, taking courage from my the selling experience gained from selling my ACEOs and other small scale artworks, I posted it pretty much immediately on Ebay as an auction.  It didn't sell, but I found that far from finding it a wrist breaking frustrating exercise of crumbling lino and sliced off fingers I actually enjoyed the process of cutting lino.  It reminded me in many ways of making a pen and ink drawing, of chiselling out an imagined space in 2D.  I quickly realised that after years of working pretty much exclusively in black and white in my dip pen and ink work, I now had a chance to expand graphically into using colour, something that I had not managed to do previously, despite various attempts at using other materials alongside India or acrylic ink applied with dip pen.  

I very quickly began using colour in my linocuts, firstly simply printing the linocut plate in a single colour, then by applying a second colour to the single linocut plate and printing twice, using a registration device I made myself from corrugated cardboard (Youtube is a great resource for linocut advice).  I made my first reduction linocut print of La Corbiere Lighthouse.  I enjoyed the process, though it is quite tiring as I hand press my prints, as I don't own a press and have very limited space to work in.  I have made several reduction linocut prints since then (March 2017) and am now embarking on my first imaginative linocut composition, which I am calling Meadowhead.

The plate I'm using is small 4 inches x 6 inches (the same size as my Corbiere print).  I print small as I hand press using a dessert spoon and I'm not sure I have the energy to print much larger prints this way.  Though no doubt I will try before long.

The inspiration for the Meadowhead composition comes partly from my heart, partly from the imaginative sparks that occur when I'm tired and drowsing in the sun (I saw the image of a coal miner emerging into a field of wildflowers in a half-waking moment) and partly it is the result of my reading recently, John Lewis-Stempels Meadowland and thinking about my family history, my great grandfather died in a mining accident in the Black Country at the beginning of the 20th century.  We are what we do for a living, and sometimes what we do for a living does for us.

I sourced photographic images, some from the Internet, others are my own digital photographs of wildflowers taken recently.

I made sketches using the photographic material, then refined this using tracing paper.  Though I really don't want to over plan as part of the joy of a linocut is treating the cutting as a drawing process, and the ink application as a painting process.  

First application of colour after initial cutting, a pale yellow with green tinge to the top 'meadow' half of the linocut print.

Second application of colour of pale green.

Third application of yellow mixed with a little extender to increase transparency of the ink.

Space Dogs!

 

 I'm feeling anxious about my new drawing, I'm not convinced that I've grasped the whole shape of the tree in the picture yet, and am certain that I've bitten off far more than I can chew at portraying the millions of tiny blossom and the gauze of twiglets veiling the tree as if the tree is dancing in a veil of twigs and branches.

But then again that was the very thing that attracted me to this subject.

 

Listening to something while I work helps me concentrate.  Today I've been listening to Black Rabbit Hall as an Ebook from One Click Digital.  I've got a free subscription to this wonderful service (I think it's wonderful anyway) via my library membership of Wolverhampton Libraries.  I believe that many library services are offering this service, another of the myriad reasons to support your local library service by joining up right now! 

That little pencil drawing at the bottom corner is an experimental ACEO.  I'd noticed that lots of people sell drawings inspired by celebrities or cult TV programmes, movies etc... and I had a quick go at starting one last night.  It doesn't look much like the person it's supposed to be though.  When I was a teenager I was good at catching a likeness but I seem to have lost the nack.

Last year a lady in Belgium bought my ACEO Walking The Dog In Space.  She is connected with a dogs charity and asked me if I would mind if she produced a small number of stamps for personal use using my design.  I said okay and today these came through the post.  I think they look really nice and they've really brightened my day.  I love the Belgian postage stamps as well!

Seeing the trees for the trees

I have almost finished my grafitti wall drawing.  I'm still not pleased with the rendering of the trees in the middle distance but happiest with the rooftops in the far distance.  I've got a little more work to do on this and will work in smaller bursts over the next few days, hopefully finishing it by the end of the week.

I've started a new drawing.  But I've not printed off my source material this time, I'm working directly from my photo on my tablet.  This has pros and cons.  One pro is that I can pinch into detail on the photo and indulge my obsessive delight in rendering an endless mess of detail into infinitum.  One con is that I can pinch into detail on the photo and indulge in my obsessive delight in rendering an endless mess of detail into infinitum.

An article in Arists & Illustrators last year mentioned that one of the drawbacks of working from photo's is that it tempts you (perhaps hypnotises would say it better) into rendering more than you would attempt to do if you are sitting directly in front of the subject.  This is true.  Sat infront of this riverside tree with all those tiny white buds just on the verge of bursting into life I would never have been so mesmerised by the detail into actually attempting to render it.  It's easy to get sidetracked into copying rather than capturing what it is about a thing that drew you to render it in whatever medium.

Too much detail = too little magic.  

I ordered some new nibs last week as my stock is running low (due to my habit of accidentally banging them into jars or dropping them when I'm tired).  I ordered some of my favourite Gillott 290 and also the fine Gillott 1290.  When it came I was alarmed as the tip of the nib is turned up and, to my eye, slightly splayed. When I contacted the supplier I was told that the nib is designed to be turned up at the tip.  I have been using it in my new drawing to render the tangle of fine branches at the bottom left of the picture, but I remain to be convinced that this is the shape this nib is intended to be.  The results are scratchy and not as fine as I expected.  I'll give it another try later and see how it progresses.

It's in the trees

I failed to meet my self-imposed deadline last week, to finish my new pen and ink drawing within a few days.  Which was probably the best outcome for me, in some ways.  I realised that the beauty and the appeal of pen and ink for me is to loose myself in the making of marks, the rendering of texture, chairescuro and solidity through intense mark making.

It does my eyes in.  It kills my back.  It's a pain in so many ways, but the obsessive nature of the process is the main point of my pen and ink drawing.  (Probably because it is a large part of my own personality)

It's not a speedy process.  It can be extremely frustrating.  It can depress the hell out of me. 

But it's as much as part of pen and ink for me as the paper and the ink itself.  And the steel of the nib.

So here is my slower progress for week 2 of my challenge.

I will still finish the piece in a sprint rather than my many previous marathons but the speed of progress is not the purpose of the piece this time.  Rather it is a product of shorter intense bursts of effort.

Short bursts which are necessary because my eyes and my body are not as young as they used to be!!!

I rather enjoyed rendering the rooftops and attempting to solve the puzzle of how do you render the miasma of tiny twigs and branches that fuzz the air between the viewer and those rooftops? 

I do not have the technical ability to render every single branch, so I have to find a way of suggesting the effect of seeing the roftops through those trees.  Areas right at the top of the picture (which is what I have been working on this morning) I am quite pleased with.  But it's not a problem solved entirely.  Far from it.

Another problem Is the foreground.  I've messed up the light/dark contrast of the foreground trees (the middle ground of the drawing).  I've given into my old weakness of trying to render too much.  Those dead leaves (or whatever they are) hanging from the branches like limp seed pods.  They are proving a real nuisance to render.

I hope I don't ruin the whole picture by messing up that area of it.