neighbours

House buying is moving along. Slowly still. The whole process is still stressing me out, still more stressful than I imagined it would be. I hadn't expected to feel this out of control of the whole situation, to be relying so much on other people to sort it out, very frustrating! But hopefully (land registry administration willing) we should have the keys by the end of the month, and then the real fun begins...


We need to replace the electrics, the boiler and the bathroom for starters, then carpet the living room, remove the lino in the bedrooms (lino in bedrooms?!) and sand the floors, sort out the kitchen, decorate throughout and landscape the garden... And now I just want to get in there and make a start.


Anyway. These books were made from lino plates I cut a while back. I made three books with the prints, with three different bindings, but didn't really like any of them; all too fussy or not strong enough, so the idea got side tracked (and the books got put in box). A few months ago I found the plates again, and realised that the altered pamphlet stitch binding I worked out for some notebooks would work here too...


The trees are printed in black ink on BFK Rives grey paper, and also on various layers of tissue. I like the way the tissue changes the black to shades of grey. Perhaps it looks a bit like there's distance between the trees? Or mist. I like the idea of travelling through the trees as I turn the page...


I was also thinking of making some single prints of these trees for my shop, for framing, although I haven't quite worked out how to get the layers of paper and tissue to stay together. Or maybe it should be interactive? Choose your own arrangement type thing... hmmm.

Fingers crossed the solicitor rings tomorrow :)

work in progress continued...

I like lino prints; the effect created by flat blocks of colour and sharp lines. But I've not had much practice at making my own prints, and I always find it a bit hard to wrap my head around what to cut when... so this week I've been trying to improve my technique a bit...

The process of cutting a reduction lino plate (like this one) really feels to go against my instincts; the instincts that lead me to hoarding and wanting to keep things as they are. I find it hard to cut into the plate that I've just printed in order to start the next layer, what if I cut it wrong and ruin it? What if I make it worse?? It gets harder the more layers a print has, by the third layer I'm really having to force myself to make the cut and then print over the already-quite-nice-looking prints... But its the same for any artist I suppose, perhaps the point is that risks must be taken, perhaps something quite-nice must be destroyed to create something good... 

Its still hard though!

So, above is the plate from yesterday (and to answer your question from yesterday Barbara, its a lino plate, but looking at the image today, I think it works quite well as it is. Hmmm, something to think about...) in its various stages...

And some of the prints...

I think, in the end, the fourth layer (the outline) didn't work so well. The line is too heavy, I like the images best without it (which  is kind of lucky because halfway through printing the last layer the beak snapped off, then the toe, so I guess thats the end of that!)

This print was also an experiment in colour. I don't have much experience with colour mixing (what with most of my prints being black and my books being white :) ) I sometimes find the many decisions that need to be made overwhelming (and it ends up brown), and with a four layer print the combinations from even a few colours become incomprehensible to me. so I really tried to limit myself, and although I'm not entirely happy with the end results, I feel a little more confident about trying again.

P.S. I know its annoying but I've turned on the little spam protection letters on the comments. Dodgy spam comments had started to appear, and thats no good, so hopefully the letters will put a halt to that...