I went to the Glynn Vivian art gallery last week, to do some live drawing at an event involving poets, storytellers and musicians. I normally draw directly from life but I went right out of my comfort zone for this one, allowing the words, music and spoken rhythms to flow into my hands and direct the marks I made onto vintage paper with Daler Rowney artists pastels. This drawing was done in response to David Pitt’s story about a caged songbird and a desert.
After I filed and degreased my new copper etching plates, I cleaned and prepared a section of the inking up area of Swansea Print Workshop to apply Andrew Baldwin‘s B.I.G. hard ground to the surface of my plates.
It’s built up in thin layers until there’s a fine, even amount of ground on the plate. Then it goes into the oven to be baked so it can be used to develop images onto the plate that will eventually be etched. So I baked it ……..
Take a sheet of warm, shiny copper. File the edges, first with a coarse file, then two successively finer ones to make a gently bevelled edge. Smooth the corners so they are slightly rounded. Flip the sheet over and gently remove the burr around the back edge with the finest file.
Then take the copper sheet to the sink and spritz it with soy sauce. Dip a sponge into French chalk and rub it all over the sheet, working the soy and chalk into a paste, making circular patterns in gentle salmon pink until the plate is completely degreased. This afternoon at Swansea Print Workshop.
Yo Humans. It is I, Sparta Puss. I haven’t been able to get my paws on the pooter box for ages because the bald monkeys I live with are ALWAYS hogging it. Idiots. The she-ape has had me on a diet. She says she’s fed up with people fat-shaming me on Facebook, whatever that is. So I’m on healthy rations. That’s what she calls it. I call it starvation! All the hairless apes in the family are cooing at me and telling me how nice I look but I DON’T CARE! There was a book a while back called “Fat Is A Feminist Issue”. Well I say that Fat Is A Felinist Issue and the monkeys should give me back my food. If I don’t care about having a bingo-belly then it’s none of their business to be bothered.
In solidarity, my felinista friends. I’ll try and get my paws on the pooter quicker next time.
I did this drawing of a seagull a couple of weeks ago at Swansea Museum from a stuffed seagull in the Museum’s stores. I think it’s a herring gull (but I’m not sure). If it is, then it’s on the conservation danger list, which surprises me because there are thousands of them around here. They’re the scourge of the city’s bin collectors as they rip open black bags and raid them, spreading rubbish all over the street. It’s a spectator sport in the city centre, watching them snatch food from people ambling along, eating in the street.
Talking of eating, I was having visitors round earlier so I baked a cake. A quick and easy chocolate all-in-one sponge, flavoured with freshly grated orange rind and iced with chocolate buttercream, which I make with Welsh salt butter, icing sugar, cocoa and a splash of vanilla. I kept it well away from seagulls.
I spent a couple fo hours at the Glynn Vivian art gallery on Saturday morning, drawing at a spoken word event, @peoplespeakup, which was part of the Swansea Fringe, with Rufus Mufasa, David Pitt and Eleanor Shaw amongst others. I like drawing in public, I think it’s good for people to be able to see how an artist works. When people go into a gallery and see perfect works of art on a white wall, they don’t get to appreciate all the hard work, practice, mistakes and rubbish drawings that preceded it.
I did some warm up drawings in my sketchbook, using a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen and the continuous line technique. This helped me to centre myself in the space and pick up on the ambience of the surroundings.
Here’s a selection of bugs from my series of silkscreened postcard-sized prints I did recently at Swansea Print Workshop. One’s a cockchafer and the other a violet ground beetle from a collection at Swansea Museum’s archives.
I printed some onto paper prepared with chine collé. I had printed sheets of handmade paper made from recycled saris, using a Gelli plate, Caligo relief inks and discarded fruit nets to create patterns. Please click here to find out more. They’re busy little critters ….
Workibng with Kelly Stewart at Swansea Print Workshop last week, I experimented with different ways to screenprint my range of drawings. I’ve always liked the chine collé technique especially with handmade paper made from recycled saris. I get it from the haberdashers in Swansea Market and it has a great texture and a some juicy colours.
I used Japanese Nori glue to stick it down – it’s made with seaweed. The sari paper is quite thin, but very strong, so it was easy to silkscreen over it – thicker paper might have caused some technical problems. The term chine collé is French for tissue collage and these fine papers have traditionally been imported from Chine, Japan and the Indian subcontinent.
The first stage in producing my recent set of screenprints was doing the drawings.
Then came the bit in the middle. I had to produce a set of transparencies. Some were photocopied from the original drawings onto a special Overhead Projector (OHP) acetate – the two bugs and the heron.
Some were redrawn onto cellophane using a brush and black acrylic paint – the two snipe. One was photocopied directly onto good quality tracing paper – the fruit net. And the text was handwritten onto Trugrain film using a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen.
The final stage is to transfer the transparencies onto a silkscreen.
I started with an ink and wash sketch of a snipe (using my homemade walnut ink at Swansea Museum) drawn with brushes.
Then, at Kelly Stewart’s screenprinting session at Swansea Print Workshop, I redrew it onto cellophane with brushes and black acrylic paint. These are the transparencies I used to create photoscreens.
And then I screened them onto different papers, Fabriano and Somerset, with Daler Rowney System 3 Acrylic paint, mixed with Screenprint medium in an 80:20 paint to medium ratio.
That’s it from beginning to end.
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