Workshop at CQ summer school - 1

"Work" started on Friday evening. Cas (Holmes) took us out into the walled garden and had us drawing without lifting the pen off the paper - a very freeing exercise. Back at our tables, we spent some time "translating" the drawing onto some of the papers we'd brought with us -Ready to get going on Saturday morning. It's always hard to know how much to bring along to a workshop -
We monoprinted, using a plastic bag to brush out the ink onto, and did relief prints -
The doily is from the tea-tray at breakfast. I put tissue under it when printing the holey bits and got a nice abstract stencilled design. Other bits of tissue were the resists from monoprints - the acrylic paint on them could then be used to stick the tissue back onto the print. The bits of fabric are printed with the end of a pen and the edge of a lid.

The other resist I used on the monoprint was a ginkgo leaf. At coffee break I collected some different leaves to use for relief printing. Getting the paint onto this one (with a brush) left a nice random pattern on the newspaper -
Next - how to use the papers we'd printed and fabrics we'd brought. Cas demonstrated using cellulose paste to layer up. The advantage (over pva) is that it's reversible - even when dry, you can prise apart the layers to insert thing, or remove bits altogether. Best materials to use are thin, natural materials - rather than synthetics.
Then we got on with our own layering up.