Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Colour

Hi! I haven't forgotten you - I've just been busy...living. 

And on Sunday I spent the day printmaking. I signed up for the workshop with Laine Tomkinson  because for ages I have been wanting to mess about with colour, and this was one way I could do it. 

It was a two woman workshop that Laine gave in her studio for my friend Liz and me.
It was fab. We did intaglio printing with glue and carburundum grit, and as a break in the middle we did a monoprint. 

Laine's wonderfully light studio is in a massive old lace mill in Nottingham. This is just one end of the mill.




We began the process by making a design on a board with PVA glue, and while it was still wet, liberally sprinkling it with carborundum grit, and then shaking off the excess to leave something like this :


To make sure it was dry we used a hairdryer:



Then we scraped on lashings of oil ink with an old loyalty card:



I have to tell you that I loved it so much when it looked like this that I wanted to stop right there. But Laine was teaching us to print, not paint, so I pressed on and rubbed in the ink with an old rag so it looked like this:





The next stage was to print it onto damp paper using a press like this:



Liz added some bits of tissue paper to hers:





And here is my finished print:





It didn't turn out quite as I wanted it to, but I can have another go, because I can use the block again. But it was super fun. Having had a day to consider the process, I'm thinking that painting is the way ahead for me, so I have more precise control on where the colour goes.

Laine was a super teacher and Liz and I both enjoyed our day.

I'll leave you with this set of rules I snapped from another artist's studio:





5 comments:

Christine said...

I love your print!

Sue Hepworth said...

Thank you! How nice!

marmee said...

Gosh! It really is so lovely! Does look so fun! What medium are you interested in? Acrylics?

Sue Hepworth said...

Yes, I think acrylics. something where I can slap on lots of rich colour.

Anonymous said...

I loved this post - when I first saw it I wanted to rush off and find something creative to do - Jen