Sketches and ATCs

Tuesday Night,
I guess I am still in painting mindset. I treated the ink like paint and glazed areas to get the softening I wanted around the edges. As soon as I added oil to the ink something happened. It became so good to play with; rich, oily and sensual. Who knew printing could feel so good? Using a paintbrush, I stroked the glaze onto the edges of the images and rubbed it into the main areas with a cloth. Now I feel much happier with the way it works with the paper.

Tuesday afternoon,
I worked on the book cover prints again on rag paper. I think I might play with inks to soften the edges of the circles. I find the edge of the blocks too harsh for such soft paper. Stitching might work well too. Hmmm, I should just get on with it as I still have signatures to make and sew for the book.

Tuesday Morning
I am hosting a steampunk themed ATC swap on March 1st. Here are 4 of my artist trading cards from the "Ticking of the clock" collection. I am planning to do some larger scale assemblage pieces on a similar theme sometime soon.

Below are some Pages from my sketchbook where I have been playing around with ideas for prints.

- and my arms still ache.....

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Encaustic Monoprint Technique

Today I visited a printmaking friend's studio. Amy is experimenting with encaustic monoprints. I have never heard of this before so I was excited to have a demo. Here is the basic process: 1. Heat up the homemade heat box. 2. Rub the beeswax pigment sticks on the metal surface of the heat plate to melt them. Create a design on the plate with one or more colors. Step 3. Lay a piece of rice or rag paper face down on the painted design and cover with newsprint. Burnish. Step 4. Carefully pull the paper away from the heat plate. Steps 5-6. Clean the heat plate with paper towels. Add more color to the heat plate and repeat the process to add patterns or more color to the print. The smell of the wax is yummy and the pigments are really thick and rich to work with. I had a little play to get a feel for what the print is like (image below). Now I want to build a heat box and play!!

Peacock Paintings/prints

I'm working on the peacock paintings at the moment and some relief prints. I am slowly filling in the shapes and colors of the paintings, starting from the top and working down with each color. I'm grouping them with my 8 color reduction cut relief print. Also a feather linocut and painting, both in their early stages. The linocuts below are variation experiments based on the imagery above. It still feels like I am a long way to completion, but hopefully they will pull together fast at the detail stage.

DeMeng Workshop

We made crazy vehicles in Michael DeMeng's workshop. Here are a selection of some of the works in progress: Here we had a critique with Michael discussing everyone's progress. I loved this steampunked up critter! This is the cool studio by the harbor that we worked in for four days, pretty cool view! Later in the day we had a project with Tracy and Teesha Moore with a bunch of artists from different workshops.

Cricketts Inky Art Blot

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