Winter views

I've just finished this painting, which I made as a present for a friend.

There's something weird going on with this photo - it's come out all wide!

I needed to work fast, and indoors, so I used acrylics, which I haven't touched for some time. It's great that they dry so fast, and infuriating that they do so, because there are colours on the palette which I want to come back to and they're no longer viable! I found I wanted to use the paint almost like watercolour - lots of layers building up the relative tones.

It took a while to finish, and I had  to keep stopping because the tones and hues changed so much over the course of the weeks, the mountain went backwards and forwards from all over very pale to strikingly black and white, to barely there palest grey, to pink at sunset. And the fields were at times so bright green I couldn't get the paint bright enough to match! Here's an earlier photo of work in progress.

 

That's more like the format of the actual canvas....I took it with a camera, and not with my iPod...maybe that's why the two photos are such different shapes??

Lino prints - the final versions

Last month I eventually finished the final layer of ink on the lino prints of my courgette design, and here they are:

The result has something of the look of the Arts and Crafts movement.  Not exactly my intention, but interesting to find how particular colour combinations can have such strong resonances.

I eventually chose a brick red as the final colour, to contrast with the turquoise/ green of the previous ink. Here's a print of the red on its own, on white tissue paper:

 I've found that tissue paper is a good for lino prints, especially as I don't have a press. The image transfers well, and I like the translucency of the ground. And if I dampen it before I print on it, the surface gets wrinkled, and so does the print - great texture!

 

Just to finish on a different note, I tried a bluer lilac mix, which makes for a colder image overall, but I don't dislike it.

Baskets

I've been learning how to make baskets. Here is my latest effort, which started out as half a gourd, with small holes evenly pierced around the top (cut) edge, then twisting bundles of rushes and securing with raffia threaded through a large needle, I ended up with this:

The shape more or less created itself. It reminds me of making coil pots from clay, and also of some of the pots we'd seen in Australia, created by the Aborigines. I'm sure it's a technique that stretches back into the mists of time. It's so flexible, and self supporting, I wanted to continue coiling and coiling, but ran out of rushes!

Christmas trees

I've been very slow at updating my blog.... not helped by a new PC to replace the old one which has all my photos on it, and then behaves in strange new ways which leave me baffled. So here are some attempts to get back up to date!


For Christmas cards, I'd been thinking about a simplified Christmas tree motif for a while, and couldn't find anything that satisfied me....until I cut off the corner of an old lino block I found on the shelf and voila! It's perfect!
(sorry - having real problems with new PC Windows 8 - can't find where to rotate photos!)

 

I've set up a mini production line on different shades of tissue paper. I like the quality of print I get on tissue paper, and the imperfections and wrinkles that naturally occur from using such fine paper.  And I knew I wanted to vary the ink across the surface, so no two prints are identical. I like that!

And then when I mount them on card, they look quite jolly!

 

Then I used the offcuts to make more trees (same non- rotational issue!)

 

 

So that was my bit of pre-Christmas creativity......



 

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....