Another long hard day, this time at Swansea Print Workshop, doing the final day of a photopolymer [solar plate] course. I’ve completed the plate I started last week and taken some proof prints, using Charbonnel ink, which I haven’t tried before – it’s gorgeous. Here’s one of the proofs. I’m hoping to do a fairly large edition. I also exposed another 4 x A6 plates and I’ll go in next week to print them up.
Tired now 🙂
Everything’s a mad rush at the moment – preparing for loads of things. Here are the drawings I been preparing for the second day of the photopolymer print course [solar plate] tomorrow. I’ve been working on them for a couple of days, using nib pen, Indian ink, ink wash and black oilbar onto Truegrain [I think it may be Mylar in some countries]. They’re tiny – around A6. My last finished piece was a painting 4 foot square!
I’m also prepping for my stint scribbling in public on the Swansea Plinth on Friday, 10.00 am – 12.00 noon if you want to come and join in [or poke me with a stick. No. Scratch the stick :D]. If you want to join in the public scribble-in, bring your sketchbook and something to draw with. I’ll give you a chair and put you on the plinth.
And then in less than a fortnight, I’m in a group show opening in Bath. It’s called Commensalis and it’s at Walcot Chapel. Here’s the programme of events – there are performers as well as visual arts. It’s free too. Then at the end of July, I’m doing more public scribbling in Disruption II and an exhibition in The Brunswick, Swansea. I’m hoping to put these photopolymer etchings in and do a few more by then as well. Oh and help to organise an exhibition of international miniature prints, Leftovers II, at Swansea Print Workshop, running mid-July to mid-August.
Then I’ll take a break!!!!
Does what it says on the tin – here’s a cat – and some berries :D. I did loads of drawings at the studio today and forgot to photograph them, so no drawings to blog tonight. But I have two of my favourite things to blog about instead – cats and gardening. These are loganberries picked this evening from my very small back garden. There’s about a pound and a half here and I’ve been picking a similar amount for about a week, with loads more ripening. Most of them will end up as home-made jam because we get tired of eating them fresh and loganberry jam is one of the most delicious things on the planet. We have an enclosed garden with tall Victorian stone walls. The loganberries are climbing up a south-facing wall and the microclimate is perfect for them. There’s a fig tree next to them and rhubarb below.
And here’s Little Ming in the background, not very pleased because I’ve been ambushing her with the brush whenever I can and she doesn’t like it one little bit. But it’s better than furballs. She doesn’t think so though.
Doing what the Brits do best ‘Writing A Letter!’ A rant from a professional grumbler lol
Had a lovely evening last night, visiting a friend’s house for a meal, conversation, music, molestation by a wet cat etc…… Our friend is a fabulous chef and put on a Middle Eastern spread of mezze followed by tagine. Then some of the chaps cleaned up and here’s one of them doing the dishes. It occurred to me how times have changed. When I was growing up, we didn’t have people round for a meal; there was barely enough food for the family and it was plain British grub – no-one would have a clue what an olive was, let alone mezze and a tagine. And as for men cleaning up?!? Unheard of. Things are so much better now 😀
The cat, Puss Puss, loves water and kept going out into the storm, getting absolutely soaked then coming in, drying herself on the guests and diving back out into the torrential rain again. We reverted to good old-fashioned British grub for dessert – rhubarb crumble – yum!
I hate shopping. I don’t understand why people love it. I’m happy to spend hours browsing in art supplies shops and tool shops but general shopping, in malls and stuff, I loathe it. Husb is the same, so after an hour or so in the city centre earlier we bolted to the cafe in Waterstones bookshop and chilled out for a bit with a nice hot drink and a biscuit. Hot drink necessary because this is a British summer, so it’s cold and wet outside. Did my usual of scribbling away at the people around me. The young man on the left seemed to be a student studying hard while the man on the right was with his wife and child and sported the sort of outrageous hat I haven’t seen since the 1970’s – they were called Donny Osmond hats back then. The man below was immensely tall with huge hands that dwarfed his cup of tea.
Scribbled in a couple of minutes each with a Faber Castell Pitt drawing pen [size S] into an A6 leatherbound, recycled sketchbook. When I got back from town, I transplanted a couple of loganberry plants that had tip-rooted themselves in my rhubarb patch using the first of our home-made compost made in one of the council’s free compost bins. The plants are destined for the gardens of friends. I love loganberries, but the fruits don’t last long so I guess they’re not suitable for growing commercially.
Midsummer’s Day and we have torrential rain! It’s humid and horrible but it was life drawing as usual this evening down at Swansea Print Workshop. I made an elderflower and lemon drizzle cake for tea break and set out to do something different with my drawings tonight. I did a short course in Renaissance style drawing a few weeks ago and I’ve done the first day of a phtotpolymer printmaking course this week. I’m hooked on the technique but the plates are quite expensive so I’ve decided to start working on A6. My usual full-colour monotypes are A1, so there’s a huge difference. I prepared some handmade paper [bought from the Tate Gallery – it’s gorgeous and wasn’t too expensive] with sepia wash, ripped it into A6 pieces and worked on them with a dip pen and Indian ink, brushes and washes and did the highlights with a fragment of white conte crayon. I did the four drawings in an hour and a half and I think I have enough to work with and adapt for a couple of little photopolymer plates next week. Watch this space………
Shattered after a full day on a photopolymer course at Swansea Print Workshop. Today, we focussed on experimenting with mark-making on Truegrain, then constructing a drawing on Truegrain, doing a testplate and then exposing a final plate ready for inking and printing next week. Here’s the test plate and the first proof. It’s a complicated process involving a series of 6 exposures resulting in 9 areas of different exposure times. I liked the effect in the bottom right hand corner and used that setting to expose my main plate. It’s a great technique for artists who like to draw.
I had a couple of minutes to spare, so did a quick scribble of one of my fellow printmakers inking up her plate behind the old Radcliffe etching press.
Our local print workshop has an artist-in-residence, Ros Ford, who is running the first part of a masterclass in photo polymer printmaking tomorrow and I have a place on it :D. I’m really excited [what a geek, eh?]. So I spent today at my studio trying out some different drawing ideas to take with me tomorrow. This is about A4 size and based on a huge painting I completed a few weeks ago. It’s just a rough study as we’ll be drawing and painting directly onto Trugrain tomorrow, before transferring the images to photo polymer plates. Look at what you can do with True-grain! [Really, what a geek!].
More sun today so I took my young niece for an icecream after school. We sat outside the ice-cream parlour overlooking the marina and I scribbled away while she munched her way through a mint-choc-chip-bubble-gum-double-cone. There were two very elderly gents at the next table, taking in the too-rare sunshine and one of them looked, to me anyway, like gonzo-king Hunter S. Thompson might have looked like if he’d survived another couple of decades. So I scribbled him as well. Both sketches took a couple of minutes each and are in HB pencil into a Daler Rowney A6 smooth cartridge, spiral bound sketchbook.
Hunter S. Thompson is probably my favourite author. I particularly love his collaborations with Ralph Steadman, whom I regard as one of Britain’s finest artists, and Steadman’s funny and poignant story of their relationship, The Joke’s Over. The sunshine didn’t last much longer; we walked home in the rain 😦
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