Hello again! I'm writing with excitement and a bit of a grin on my face as I've just got back from the Art department of our local garden centre with a bag of goodies to experiment with!!! This week, I've gone back to my printmaking roots and indulged in some mono-prints - a fantastic technique for creating atmospheric images and playing around with visual ideas with immediate results.
Getting out all the bits and pieces needed for mono-printing really got my creative juices flowing and I soon had a set of interesting bird images which have a completely different feel to my other paintings and drawings. Excited to push the printing further, I had the urge to make some 'collagraph' plates , so out came the cardboard, glue and salt, and I began to draw on the card with the glue and salt to create a rich textured surface to print from.
(A collagraph is a type of print where the plate is made up of a collage on cardboard to create different marks and textures on its surface. Collagraphs can be printed either in relief or intaglio, these methods give very different qualities to the final print but both are interesting. I prefer the intaglio version which needs a printing press to create a successful image, where a relief print can be made by hand using a roller, baren or a wooden spoon.)
Having varnished my collagraph plates to make them waterproof (so the damp paper doesn't stick to the glue during printing,) I was reminded of just how beautiful the plate alone can be....and this is when I had my 'lightbulb moment'!! I'm going to try to paint paintings with this '3D' texture...DOH!!! I can't believe I didn't think to do this before...???!!!!!!! So....my purchases include Acrylic Texture Gel and Acrylic Modeling Paste. I can't wait to crack on with a new painting where I can experiment with THICK PAINT!!!! I'll post the results so you can see how I get on...for now I have a few paintings to show you...
The first is just a sketch I did the other night when I couldn't get to sleep. Instead of tossing and turning for hours on end, I decided to put my sleeplessness into action...here's the result: (I used some photos on my phone as reference)
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| Graphite Drawing of a Lanner Falcon and a Scops Owl |
Next is a large scale Acrylic painting of Woolley, one of my favourite owls to paint! I wanted to paint this BIG with a view to hanging it in a large space, but feeling a bit nervous wondering if I could make it work at this scale...but I love it!!
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| Woolley in progress |
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| Woolley, Finished! |
My next couple of paintings see a return to water colour. Both fairly experimental pieces as I have never painted either bird before. Daisy is an American Turkey Vulture - an interesting character! - I wanted to paint her in a 'loose' fashion, not too careful. The blue tit on bulrushes is a picture I've wanted to paint for quite a long time, but didn't quite know how to approach it. I saw this over a year ago on the pond at Puxton...the shape and texture of the bulrushes intrigues me. This is still a work in progress as I need to work on the background, but I am happy with it so far.
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| Daisy, Turkey Vulture, Water Colour |
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| Blue-Tit on Bulrushes, Water Colour. |
My final picture for this blog is yet another of Woolley...again an experimental piece as it is a completely different medium for me - pastels. This came about through watching a Pastels 'how to' DVD with my Mum in the Easter holidays... the Artist made it look very easy (don't they always!) and I got the urge to give it a try, so Mum offered me the use of her pastels and a few sheets of pastel paper...and here's the result - Woolley in pastel. I didn't really enjoy using the pastels - they are quite messy and because this is a relatively small painting, fairly fiddly too! However, having said all that, this picture has grown on me and I like it! It could do with some 'finishing' around the branch area, but I'm in no rush to get back to pastels, so this is probably how it will remain!
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| Woolley, Pastel approx 10" x 7"ish! |
So, that's all for today...look out for my next blog where I'll post my mono-prints and possibly a collagraph or two... bye for now,
Mandi ;)
I enjoyed this blog very much, Daisy looks really menacing! Loooking forward to seeing your experiments.
ReplyDeleteaahh, bless - Daisy isn't really menacing at all - in fact she's quite comical!! Gary will tell you that if he doesn't sit with her for his morning coffee, she gets the hump and misbehaves during her flying display! Talking of which - just to prove how non-menacing she really is - during a display last week on a particularly windy day, Daisy got blown off course and ended up being mobbed by the local crows in the next field! Poor Daisy just sat cowering in a tree waiting for Gary to rescue her! Daft as a brush really!! xx
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