More Printmaking Experiments

Happy New Year!
I'm having a happy time in the studio trying out various different things.  I've been having great fun making chine colle prints - adding bits of Japanese paper onto prints to give them extra colour or texture.

I started with this one. I felt a little tentative about adding the chine colle and I was teaching myself as I went along, so with this first one I used Japanese paper with wavy lines in order to give the sea a bit more interest. It's a bit tricky as you have to add glue to the paper and then place it on top of the printing plate glue side up so that the paper sticks to the printing paper.  As this result ended up not too messy, I was quite pleased with this as a start and thought I'd continue.

My next effort was to add some colour.  This time I was using an aquatinted copper plate which I had cut off a larger plate I hadn't been happy with.  I had burnished it then re-aquatinted - I was trying to salvage something from this!  'I must be subtle' I thought to myself, so selected some cream-coloured tissue which I hoped would improve the look of the sky, and offset this with a cream-coloured paper with coloured fibres in the foreground. 

Making these prints was stimulating me to think about blocks of colour in the landscape, and also accentuating how light might fall. At this stage I was still trying to be subtle. So here was the next effort with another new photopolymer plate.

But then I got bolder and I thought I might try more of a landscape colour, using the same plate. It's really interesting to compare and contrast the two results, isn't it?

I then thought I'd try colour on another small plate. I wanted to use an orange-coloured paper as the image on the plate was based on an autumnal view in the Gruinard area (near Poolewe).

The first colour shape looked a bit too contrived. So I had a second go with a simpler geometric shape, then with my third go, I finally settled on a simple triangle.

I think this simpler shape has the effect of making the image look more abstract. So now I'm thinking about how to create new images where I might add chine colle colour shapes like this.

The great thing about doing this is that there's always an element of surprise when you pull each new print!