Lino prints

I started cutting a lino block way back in the Summer, when my courgette plants were young, and the first fruits were forming on them. But I didn't get round to printing from the block until recently (the start of some damp Autumn weather). I'm doing this in stages - I think it's called reductive printing. Here are some of the prints. After an initial yellow/orange print, I cut out some more and printed in leaf green:

For the third print down I dabbed a bit of red ink straight onto the lino before printing. I like the result, but don't want to ruin it by printing over it, so it may stay as it is...

I want to make a virtue out of the fact that I can't get perfect prints without a press, but you get more texture in the areas where the inks are thinner. I'm hoping that after several more overprints the layers of ink will still be visible beneath the final one.

Now the third stage of cutting and overprinting.  I also wanted to try printing on tissue paper. The finer the paper, the easier to get a print. At first I thought I'd go for dark blue/green:

This print was directly onto yellow tissue. I hope that there's enough detail there not to miss the earlier under-printing.

Then something told me to try a lighter, more turquoise ink:

 

 

I'm pleased with these. Just one more layer of colour to go...which I think might be a rich purple, but then again I might change my mind....

Pastel Peppers

Here is a drawing I made in my sketchbook. The peppers had been lurking in the fridge for a while. They needed eating, but I wanted to record their concertina wrinkles before we chopped them up.

There's something very rewarding about drawing a still life of fruit in soft pastels. There's some affinity I find between the rich colours of both, and their textures.

A cot blanket for Albane

Some more baby knitting:

Audrey had started knitting a baby blanket, but didn't have time to finish, so I quickly and happily volunteered to help out....

She'd made a section of garter stitch, which needed to be valued, but I couldn't continue that for the rest of the length, so I added some rows with holes, then I thought of making patterns with holes, hence the date of birth and name, finishing it off with another row of holes and a pink ribbon.

Not the kind of thing I usually do, but appropriate for the task and hopefully will keep her warm as the nights draw in....

September painting week

It's taken me ages to get round to blogging, but better late than never....

I went up to Ray's for a week of painting in early September, and here are the results:

My first painting was of the sweetcorn flowers against the frame for the vine behind. We'd been talking about how to depict space and depth..not my forte!...but I was pleased with the forms of the drooping leaves and the composition of the crossing stems.

Here's a photo of the painting as I worked on it, in Ray's beautiful veggie garden:

And this one is unfinished. I was looking at some of David Hockney's landscapes and decided to try and work in heightened hues of flat colours, and I was pleased with the way this was coming along, but ran out of time...now I just need to finish it! (Same old story!)

Something for a little baby

A friend has just had a baby, a few weeks early, so she's very small, but healthy and happy. I wanted to give her something..and this is what I knitted for her:

It's only about 10cms long, but looks huge next to its new owner!

Inspired by my veggie patch ....

... I thought I'd sketch some of the forms and sights that fascinate me. So here goes:

First off is the courgette plant. Giant leaves with a mosaic of green and white, bright yellow trumpets of flowers, which so quickly twist up on themselves, holding on to the fruit itself, which can grow almost while you're watching it.

Working from sketches, I'm planning to make a lino print. Here's a rough drawing to work out the colour layers for the print:

Here's the lino, first cut:

Northern Spain

Here are the three 'sketches' I made on my iPod from our trip to Northern Spain. The more I use it, the happier I am about the lack of accuracy of the lines. I think it adds life to the image. The first is a much over-rated, tourist infested village of Santillana, full of honey coloured stone buildings.This was the view from our bedroom window.

Santillana del Mar

The nearby caves at Altamira are famous for the paintings on the roof of the cave, but the visitors were damaging the atmosphere, and therefore the paintings, so the Spanish have built a full-size, faithful recreation of the caves which you can walk through and see how the paintings appeared. There is a whole 'ceiling' of paintings, all jostling for position.  



Cave paintings at Altamira



Along the roadside there was masses and masses of broom in full flower - so here are those accents of yellow colouring a lakeside view.

Our journey took us along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. Every day we passed pilgirms with backpacks and walking poles plodding along, sometimes on paths parallel to the road, sometimes just beside the road. It's 800kms from the French border, which is weeks of walking. As we continued towards Santiago my admiration grew for all those people who had the determination to press on, day in, day out making dogged progress under the hot sun, or in the rain. Here's a Santiago cake we bought in town - I loved the decoration; made with a stencil, I assume.



Santiago cake


As we were turning back North to cross the Pyrenees we saw clouds rolling over the tops of the mountains. A strange site above the arid, sun-baked plains.