Still raining

I decided that I wanted to try a coloured collagraph version of 'Storm in a teacup'.

The first step is the collagraph plate. I made it quite light on texture because I want the colour to show through.

I've printed several to use with washes of watercolour.

 I'm also going to print some colour separation monoprints and then print the collagraph on top. But that will need a decent amount of time setting aside and while the weather holds there's lots of allotmenting that needs doing.

And in between I've been making some small monoprints on fabric to go in ''An inch a day'.

Printing

Things are ticking over slowly. I’ve made a plate from the drawing of the fools in a cage 

 and printed it.

 

 I struggled with the mountboard that I used for the plate. It was stuff I got in a hurry at the beginning of lockdown, not my usual sort and it needed peeling much deeper to get to the rough internal core I need for the darks. This made a step on the plate that was a bit too much for my small press at home to deal with, leaving some white haloing in parts. I may try on the big press at Hot Bed when we can return.

The chair of our book art group is currently making a video for BABE about our group project “An inch a day” and the difficulties of making a group project (which will be about 90 feet long) when we cannot meet up to work together.

This spurred me to trying to make some relevant images for it. As a warm up up I tried monoprint.

Trace monoprints

 Stencils 

 And dark field monoprints. 

 All tacked onto a sample of the book base fabric. All made using an X cut (die cutting Machine). I was amazed how well they worked and this will be a much simpler and quicker process than the collagraph plates I had envisaged making.

(Does anyone know why new blogger keeps randomly altering my typeface?)