Drawing, painting, printmaking - continuation

The previouspost ended with this image - the plate in place for overprinting yellow onto a red print. The shapes are stencils that had already been printed by being part of a red plate. Confused? I was, and am!

 Here's how it came out, once the stencils were removed -

 My other monoprints from Day Two -

 The one at top left had had some bits of paper on the plate that blocked out printing (ie, stencils), which left "interesting" gaps ... so I couldn't resist trying out various types of stitching to fill in those gaps. The couching, on the right, works best ... but you do have to be careful not to put creases in the rather thin paper -

First item on the Day Three agenda was a slide show of various painters whose practice and output included prints - Edvard Munch, Joseph Albers, Picasso, Jim Dine's tools, Robert Rauschenberg, David Hockney, Lucien Freud, Glenn Brown, Sean Scully, Mimmo Paladino, Barbara Rae, Anselm Keifer, Howard Hodgkin, Ian McKeever, Hughie O'Donoghue, Andrzej Jackowski, Peter Doig, Stephen Chambers, and these -

 The painters among us happily set up easels and got on with it, whereas I am always at a loss for "how to start painting" ... so I drew some more kettles ...

 ... and then tried painting them - not a pretty sight, not an enjoyable task -

 Sue suggested treating the task of painting like doing a drawing, using very dilute paint and replaying some of the drawing exercises we did yesterday, eg holding the brush in different ways or, as she demonstrated on the left, flooding areas and then adding a bit darker paint that would spread through the water -

 I found it really helpful to see someone actually do it, rather than just explain what to do.

By the end of the day I had met my self-imposed quota of 12 paintings, plus used up some yellow paint very quickly, which made the whole thing much more cheerful -

 During this exercise I discovered The Joy of Kettle Reflections -

Here's a closeup ... there are reflections within reflections ...

Elsewhere in the room -

 During the slideshow the RA Summer Show was mentioned and after class I went along to spend half an hour there, looking at a few prints, like this one, which I hadn't noticed before and which doesn't much appeal to me, but I feel I have some insight now into how it came about -

 Day Four - We started with a demo of how screenprinting can be painterly. A revelation.

 As well as screens on boards with added bits of card to give "snap", the supplies consist of inks that are half acrylic paint and half acrylic printing medium (bottom right), which can be further extended with more medium, and squeegees for adding swathes of colour(s). And water soluble crayons, for lines.

 Results, layered up, can be surprising, and spectacular -

 I got back to my kettles, and monoprints, adding in some mugs as stencils -

The main kettle was printed over the painted one, and then the yellow plate was used to add background, with some inadvertent transfer of yellow in the middle, which actually works quite well -

Scrim was on hand and I printed some over the mug stencils (resulting paper print is top left; note the missing corner of the fabric) -

 

and later, another piece printed by itself ... just look at that lovely torn edge -

 Plans for that print are to add some monoprint, perhaps like this mother-and-child kettle family -

 A prussian-blue plate, with the stencil printed while the plate was darkest, and then used on the black plate. On the right, it's about to be re-used -

 - and this is the result - fainter, but with some background embellishment -

 Stencils on top of stencils (the plate is on the right) -

and the printed scrim on top of the stencil print ... but you lose the scrim-texture of the blue background -

Finally, getting a ghost on the used plate (left), along with some spirally stencils, which seemed Too White, but were reused (right) to get one more print out of the plate, and to see what happened to the bits on ink (measles!) that were dotted on -

One more day of this roller-coaster ride ... the day when we "finish it all off". As if that were ever possible!