Work In Progress: Miner’s Wives1.

I spent a few hours down at Swansea Print Workshop this afternoon, trying out some more ideas for the print I intend to make about the glorious South Wales Miner’s Wives from the 1984-1985 strike. I have already made some pen and ink sketches from contemporary press photos and I’m trying out different materials to redraw this image onto Mark Resist film, a step in the photo-screenprint process. This first one is drawn with Indian ink and a script dip pen – it has a little blob on the point. I haven’t used one before and it’s fun. I tried some lettering too. I also used a little Soft-Ground Tusche (for lithography) applied with an Isabey squirrel-hair brush. It’s giving some interesting textures.

This is a start – it was very wet and needed a while on the drying rack so I got stuck into some more experiments. I’ll work into it with other wet and dry drawing media in the next few days.