Skip to main content

Day 2


The weather was fantastic on Day 2, so i packed up some watercolours and headed to the nearby cemetery. There were some really interesting stones and iron railings. I had never seen wooden railings around graves before, so I sketched these spindles for a while and admired the worn grain.

Walking to this stone angel, I heard a rattlesnake give a warning sound. After that I stuck to the wide paths!
The views were amazing, I can see why the early miners chose this as their resting place. The silence was a peaceful one, not a creepy dark one, like so many graveyards back in England. There were swooping magpies following me looking for crumbs from my tuna sandwich. I decided to make a sketch of one as a plan for an etching, but once I got to the press, I switched the magpie out for a crow.
I also made some monotypes of this old barn that is within view of the retreat center.







Photos of me printing (in the morgue) by Frances Melhop
 

This was the first pull off the drypoint plate.


By midnight, the inking station was getting a bit messy...oops.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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!!
5 comments
Read more

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.
3 comments
Read more

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.
3 comments
Read more