This week I almost began by writing, “Go along home folks. There’s nothing to see here.”
I’ve done the required hand sewing on a large quilt to back it. I’ve done some mending. I’ve had some meetings. And, in between, I’ve pulled out the materials to do a bit of monotype printing on thin papers.
Nothing has knocked my socks off yet.
But, I have a vision of some new collages I want to try, and a nebulous sense of what kind of papers will be required. I printed yesterday. Then this morning I cleaned up all the papers I had printed and had strewn around my worktable.
So, I can at least say while looking at them, “Well, not yet folks. Not much to see yet. But maybe these parts will turn out to be interesting.”
Here’s the large plastic stencil I cut to form tree images, and which I’ve used a lot this summer to create printed fabric. This week, I used it for image-making on the gelatin plate.
These papers show the different ways a stencil can yield a printed image. The paper in the foreground is a resist. I inked the plate. (I’m using “ink” as a verb. I actually print with acrylic paint.) I put the tree stencil down on it, then pressed on my paper to print. The subtle marks that are already on this sheet show through where the trees blocked them out, and the olive green paint went onto the background.
The paper sheet in the rear was printed from what was left on the plate. The image of the tree formed by the stencil was still inked after I lifted off the stencil. So, I used it to print onto a sheet that already had a lime green background.
More resist-then-print from the ghost image, this time with leaves:
In the background is a sheet where I used my leaf stencil for the paint to go through the holes and create leaf shapes. (I added the linear shapes afterwards.) Then, in the foreground, I used the ghost image to create leaves as outlines.
Below, I used the same ghost image on two different backgrounds. I like the way they speak to each other
My final bit of experimenting involved contrast between my homemade gelatin plate with the commercial one.
My homemade gelatin plate is at least a year old, maybe older. After a while they start to show a lot of wear in the surface. But I love the way that creates spongy, parchment-like all-over textures, like the gold printed sheet shown above right.
The foreground sheet with tree limbs was printed on my commercial geli plate. For now, it will have to be my go-to plate for defined images.
As I keep visualizing what I want these to become, I realize I just don’t have enough printed stuff yet. I’ll need some more sessions, with more variation in imagery, for this to unfold and evolve to finished work.
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This week I will be showing work in the Boutique at Artburst.com. This fun art-for-purchase site lets you discover art and artists easily, with new work available regularly. Please visit.
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For all of us: focus each day on the good that needs to be done in the world.
Be part of doing it.
Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
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