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: