I’ve been making some collages from recent botanical Gelli Plate prints. Here is a detail of one of them, showing the overlay of the ripped pieces of prints and the outline of some of the botanical subjects. They’re going to be scanned professionally and massively enlarged for an exhibition in January.
This #Caturday Saturday, my negative silhouette of little rescue cat Bill shows a cyanotype print of an ostrich feather. I cut the image of Bill from some very heavy textured paper that I recycled, I painted it black and started to experiment with it.
Back in November 2012, Husb and I were lucky enough to visit the wonderful country of Iceland, the original Land of Ice and Fire. The landscape was unlike anything I’ve ever seen, brutal with beautiful colours. It was freezing cold and drawing was a challenge, not only for my fingers but also my drawing materials – my pens wouldn’t work and it was too cold to get my watercolours out. I settled on compressed charcoal, soft pastels and ink. I drew into my Khadi handmade paper square sketchbook, often using both sides for the same scene.
I haven’t posted for a few days because I’ve been ill. Again! The second stomach bug in three weeks! Really fed up with it now.
This is my life at the moment, sedentary with a cat. But I can’t enjoy it because I feel rotten. Never mind, these things run their course in a week or so. This is an old sketch from years ago.
This #Caturday Saturday, my silhouette of our little Bill is on top of a cyanotype print that someone threw away, I fished it out of the paper bin! I think she looks lovely silhouetted against the ostrich feather. The image of Bill is cut out of some discarded paper too. I painted it black.
I’ve been pretty slack about sketching for a while now. I used to scribble every day, but since Covid I’ve slacked off and I’m a bit mad with myself for it. So I’m going to try to do a 2 minute sketch daily, from newspapers. Come on, two minutes a day should be achievable???!!!! We’ll see. Here’s the first – two minutes tops!
Twelve years ago I was lucky to be able to visit Iceland, the country not the food store! I know this is a cliche, but it’s a magical place full of strange light and landscapes.
I’ve reached November 2012 in my sketchbook archives, just over a year since I started this blog to put my sketches out there into the world. It’s difficult to show sketchbooks, yet they underpin the work of many artists.
This month it was mostly people with a few crows – I think they were crows but they could have been some other crow-ish birds.
I’ve been doing a lot of Gelli Plate printing lately and I’ve ended up with lots of prints, mainly from botanicals – leaves, grasses, flowers etc… They’re nice to look at but don’t really stand up as artworks in their own right. So I’ve been reusing them. Yesterday I posted badges I’ve made with some. Today I’ve been developing collages. Here are some sections of them, showing the overlay of ripped pieces of Gelli prints, and some reused cyanotypes as well. I’ll be building text from these tiny scraps over the next few days.
I’ve been doing a lot of teaching and demonstrations recently and I’ve collected lots of Gelli Plate prints using leaves, and some graphite rubbings as well. I’ve an art and craft fair coming up on December 7th and I thought I’d use the gel prints to make unique and original badges
They’re very shiny and pretty, it’s hard to believe that some of them are plants! I’ll have other things to sell, but it’s always good to have some pocket-money / stocking-filler items.
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