Sketching on a Sunny Winter Day

Last week I grabbed advantage of the beautiful weather, grabbed my sketchbook, and did some stuff. I started with a few (crappy!) watercolour washes, let them dry, then drew on top. The goal was to get the "feel" of what I was looking at, not so much be precise in representing it accurately.

This first one was done beside the little seasonal trickle of water that skirts our wetland; the melt is causing a lot of runoff, so the trickle was burbling along very merrily. Clockwise from upper left (interpreting my chicken-scratch) are the reflections off the moving water with reeds & grasses at the edges, then the movement of water across a rill, submerged pebbles where I just drew the dark areas kind of around the pebbles (not exactly negative space drawing, but it kind of worked out that way), then finally the reflection of a twig as the water moved the reflection.
Next is a stand of alders at the edge of our little pond, with conifers in the background. This is pretty much all about interpreting the negative spaces.
Once again, the weather was beautiful today, but it looks like it's changing, so I wanted to get out and get some more sketches done.

This first one is of the winter aconite (or Acontium) poking up through the leaf litter in a little patch of sunny garden out front. They, together with snowdrops, are probably the earliest little flowers to poke up out of the ground around here, and even then, they're quite late this year because of the heavy snow load we had around Christmas and New Years (there is still snow on our field). Anyway, I did a semi-blind contour drawing with sepia-coloured Pigma pen, then built up the painting. I was trying to keep the glow and delicacy of the flowers, and the loose and messy nature of the leaf litter.
Next up was the hazelnut outside our living room window. I parked my stool by the bird feeder and was scolded a few times for interrupting the dinner party, but they continued without a bother nonetheless. I loved the way the flowers of the hazelnut glow in the winter sun, especially against the deep darks of the conifers in the background. Plus, the shadows on the snow were just delicious; I had a lot of fun mixing the colours for them.
Finally (and I was getting kind of cold by now, so I didn't spend as much time on this one), the old Gravenstein apple tree, all gnarly, pock-marked and in need of a winter hair-cut (Dave's not been over in time yet to do so). Mostly, I had fun dropping wet colours into wet.
Now, I am definitely not comfortable with watercolours, and am not someone to follow when it comes to using this media, but I sure like to use them in the field for sketching, and adding colour.

Christmas Card Chaos

I couldn't decide on what to do for Christmas cards this year. I usually do something for family & friends, as well as for customers who have purchased my work during the year (so that translates to roughly 60 cards altogether), but this year I also had two print exchanges for an additional 40 cards. After Goosey's demise, I had wanted to do something to commemorate him again, but the idea I had was more complicated than I felt like working on (especially for so many prints).

Sketch for card using Goosey as the subject
(those are snowflakes in the background)

I had worked on another image a couple of years ago in acrylic that I was never very happy with, but I liked the idea:

Acrylic on board, 8"x10"

I really like the feeling of the finch sitting on the cold, bare, slightly snow-dusted branches, so I took the same source photo and simplified the overall look to get this year's general (i.e. to friends & family) card:

I carved the image into wood-mounted linoleum and printed it using the Adana 4x6 No 2 on Strathmore Bristol paper using Speedball water-soluble inks. The image is 5 1/2"x3". I was pretty happy with the text (first time I've used it really in a print - have to write backwards for the text to read correctly; cheers for computer software & printers!!). It performed sufficiently, but I still wasn't 100% pleased.

I thought I'd try my hand at chine collé. So I printed the piece first on kitakata green paper (a thin Japanese paper), then mounted it (using nori paste) onto Cartiera Magnani "Pescia", a stiffer, supposedly "creamy smooth" printmaking paper, although it's really rough (cold pressed) with quite a tooth, and very thick. I'd ordered it from Dick Blick in a "what the heck" moment, but I don't really think it's appropriate for relief printing, or at least not what I do.

Really, for the chine collé, you're supposed to place your fine paper on top of your inked plate, dust with nori powder or paste the back of the fine paper, then place your mounting paper on top, and run everything through a press. As I don't have a press, this wasn't going to work. And the whole point to using finer paper was so that I wouldn't have such a hard time burnishing to transfer the image. Unfortunately, the Speedball doesn't ever really loose its water solubility, so the moist paste spread very thinly on the back still slightly activated the dried ink on the front, resulting in a few of these with a couple of tiny smudges here or there.

The card will be folded between the text & image, so that the image sits facing forward. The fold is not centred, so you end up with kind of an interesting card. I love the pale green of the kitakata paper, and it has a beautiful finish that's just a dream to print on. I'm definitely going to use it again.

Finally, I had one more image I wanted to play with. I have been working on this image in various print media over this year. First was a stone lithograph, then an acrylic monotype, and now I've done it in a linocut relief print.

The original image was a pencil sketch of a photograph I took up at Dad's one winter. I really love the contrast of the aspen against the conifers in the background, and the neat textures of the bark on the aspen.

For this relief print, I wanted the image smaller, so I scanned the sketch, reduced the dimensions, mirror-flipped it, and printed it off, then stuck it onto the lino block.

I used graphite paper to trace the image onto the block (so the graphite paper is placed between my working sketch and the block). This is great stuff because the resulting line is quite fine, and I can erase the graphite before I print, so that I don't get graphite transferring onto the final paper.

I removed all the areas that I wanted to stay white using wood carving tools to carve away the linoleum. Here's a photo of the inked up lino block showing the carving details:

I ran a few proofs and fiddled a bit with the image, but then was happy with the result pretty quickly. The final prints (so far only 20 for the second print exchange, but I think I'll do more), are on Rising Stonehenge grey paper, and the image size is 6.25"x3.5", printed using Faust's AquaLine water-soluble "Carbon Black". It's very buttery to use, a bit stinky, but I really like using it, and it seems to print quite well on heavy paper with hand burnishing (an unusual find, for me!).

Pays d'Hiver (Winter Country)

I'm very pleased with the end result (this photo is somewhat warmer than the actual print), and will be doing more than 20 for the edition. But my arms have given up tonight so I won't be doing any more prints for a little while.

The Highs and Lows of Reduction

Here's the latest contribution to the portfolio.

"Where the Lilies Grow"
Speedball water based ink (6 colour run) on Strathmore Bristol, cut from vinyl, edition size 6, dimensions 100mmx71mm (roughly, but slightly smaller than, 4"x2 3/4").

1. I wanted to convey a cathedral-like atmosphere; the place where these tiger-lilies were growing was by a road cutting through northern forest. The trees in the background seemed to be uplifted and bringing the lilies up with them. So here's the underlying composition I was using:

Doesn't really quite line up properly here, but the idea was to have a vanishing point off beyond the paper, to give it the image some lift.

2. Something I'm extremely happy with is the "relief quality" feel of this piece. I sometimes struggle with the medium; I don't necessarily make use of that special quality of the relief print where there's tool marks, and the special kind of tool marks inherent in relief printing. Here's a close up of the upper left hand corner where I feel this was particularly successful:

This is also a good example of why I enjoy using reduction - I feel that the layering of the colours is particularly lovely in this passage.

3. Something I constantly struggle with and am not happy about is smudginess in parts where there's a large area that's been cut away and non printing surrounding a tiny area I want to print with the last colour when I'm down to my last state of the plate.

This is an example from one of the prints that did not make it into the edition. What a pain that it happens AT THE VERY LAST COLOUR. Argh. One of the pitfalls to reduction!

The more I read on the printmaking section of the WetCanvas! forum, and the more I work with the vinyl blocks & Speedball inks, the more I figure I need to buy some better materials. So I'm awaiting my litho friend's list of litho goodies he wants before I put in an order to Daniel Smith for some stuff. I've had a look at people's suggestions throughout the forum on inks & papers, so I've got some ideas of what I'd like to try. I'm afraid I'm going to stick with water based for now, mostly from the fumes perspective (oil-based inks make me nauseous), although I might sample the water cleanup oil-based inks at some point. I'm also thinking about Natalia's technique of combining reduction & multiplate once I get some lino blocks. I can't do that with sufficient exactness yet because I cut and size my own vinyl blocks, and I'm not precise enough to get good alignment for multiplate printing. Besides, the material is squidgy, so it can deform, thus two cut as exactly as possible might still not align properly.

Anyway, I'm still learning, and still figuring out things with this medium, and having a lot of fun doing it. Overall, I'm quite pleased with this edition (wish it had been a wee bit larger, but... ehn), and I'm very happy with the way the image worked out; it was definitely what I saw in my mind. And I really like the colours, too, kind of delicate. I think the feeling is just right.