Woodblock printing progress

Enlivening the plain circles are these blocks -

 A variety of combinations are possible -

 Rolled up, they harmonise -

And most recently - new colours

and some intense overprinting, with unexpected embossing of the elements that weren't inked -

I'm still thinking about putting the prints together in pairs - here are some combinations -

Drawing Tuesday - Museum of London

In the Medieval London gallery was an eel spear, and behind it a basketwork fish trap -

 Nearby was a selection of distilling equipment and other medical artefacts -

Some of them made it onto my pages, though the eel spear was manageable only at smaller scale -

...along with a silver pomador and, to confuse the scale of things even further, the kinds of tiny trinkets that are so easily lost, to reappear at the riverside centuries later.

 Sue fit some lovely nail-soled boots onto her page -

 Janet K tackled Mithras -

Having drawn some cooking implements, Joyce thought they looked rather stark, so she filled in the page in grey to subtly set the scene -

Carol found a comb and bucket, both about 1000 years old - the gaming piece is possibly a little younger -

 Judith re-created the Fire of London -

 Extracurricular activities
Joyce had spent a few days doing interesting things with paper - such as embossing -

 and wrapping and crinkling Lokta paper -

and making interesting book structures -

Carol brought along a collection of small objects and told us how she uses them as a way of starting stories -

Tool of the week is a pencil case, made by Janet's friend -

Those are tiny squares, and they are sewn with french seams - which makes sense, because you don't want fraying fabric inside a pencil case -

Works on Paper Fair - some favourites

Of course the best things have always been sold, isn't that how we think when we try to restrain ourselves from desperately wanting to buy something? At this annual fair of prints and drawings, works are taken off the wall and wrapped up and the new owner takes them home. This one, the boats, was still on the wall and I got a quick photo -

A bit of online research discovers that it's part of Robert Taverner's "Sussex boats and nets" series - see other boats and nets, as well as his other Sussex subjects, here.

Lady in the Snow - indigo print, c.1830 by Utigawa Kunisada

A drawing from the 1970s by Mary Fedden, "graphite and mixed media", the mixed media being the pale pink of one flower, and perhaps the frottage qualifies as mixed media too -

Detail of marks

It was priced at £4,500...

Back to Japanese prints - this "diptych" format (by Watanabe Seitei) appeals to me, and were it not for the tiny pleat in the paper on the left I would have smashed open my piggy bank to buy it -

 Another such -

 Part of Peter Blake's Venice Suite, which incorporates collage -

 A vivid work by Alan Davie -

 Finally, this long narrow format, glued onto card ... odd, but so appealing; priced at £950 ...

(Apologies for the reflections and the dull coloration.) The artist is Kitano Tsunetomi, who made his name in the early 20th century as a "painter of beautiful women" - see them here.

Sports fixation!

"This is a very unlikely subject for you of all people," said a friend. I explained about the way the camera has caught the gestures and made the bodies into shapes you might not normally see. All that action....

At the painting class on Thursday I overestimated the amount of paint I could use in two hours, and instead of throwing the rest away, was encouraged to take it home, thoroughly wrapped in clingfilm. It's taken till Saturday morning to settle down to a few hours' painting. I find it best to get started right away, before breakfast - but not before coffee -

 Trying the net + plastic again - the clear sight would save a lot of cutting out!

But even on "proper plastic", too much of the paint is left behind rather than being caught in the net -

 The patchy paint looks ok on the dark background, but won't do for this project.

Next bright idea is to use a lightbox so the details can be seen through fabric that's more opaque. A blank ipad or computer screen, covered by something firm like a sheet of perspex, makes a good lightbox.

 Again, the cutout is inside a plastic folder, and the patch of fabric is stretched on the folder by the masking tape.

Result! -

It takes me a long time to do each one, but it's fun (ie, not difficult) and absorbing.

Let's try some loosely woven linen -

 Start with the darker areas, put in a bit of shadow -

 Then try to replicate the uniform -

I'm purposely using somewhat strange skin tones, one of which is burnt sienna (as in blue-uniform in a previous pic).

Once there are a few of these I'll try laying them out and adding quilting, see if that will work with the painting or whether there needs to be another round of experimentation.

Life painting and the sports pages

The sports-pages textile piece seems to be gaining momentum. The idea of outlines has been abandoned for this project, and I'm looking at how to use the full-colour figures.

The painting course had a session last week of life painting -

Three quick drawings with a twig, and a longer pose with ink

Coloured ink for a floor pose

which wasn't too unbearable, though my results (some not shown!) were clumsy to say the least. This week we brought in our own project - mine is to find a way of painting the "boyz&ballz". Without the previous classes, I wouldn't have dared tackle "people" shapes!

The first idea was to use an embroidery hoop to layer up white fabric, the image, clear plastic, and fabric, and then to copy the image - trace it, with paint - onto the fabric. Fortunately the boxes of brushes yielded one small brush; I also use palette knives -

In progress; the fabric is cream net, almost invisible

He's done

 Unfortunately when the net was peeled away from the clear layer (cellophane, rather than plastic), a lot of the paint stayed on the plastic rather than staying on the net.

Next I used thin silk; the acrylic paint soaks in well -

Oh dear, that beard...

At home, I  haven't yet had time to get out the paints, but had a happy hour playing with ways of gluing the newspaper figures to fabric; this means that opaque fabrics can be used for the background. Net was another possibility, with the net around the figure being caught in the eventual quilting.

The first attempts -

Gluing (pva) was done on proper plastic, so that it would peel off easily. And a hair dryer was used to speed up the drying. From bottom left: when covered with glue the paper stretches and buckles. On net, sloppy application of glue leaves shiny bits here and there - but small figures do stick well. Applying glue only to the figure makes for neater net. On linen, figures stick well; glue can be applied before the figure is cut out.

From a bag of green scraps - turf. Looks good on individual pieces, but will it work on the big piece, which will be a metre long? (These figures are less than 20cm high.)

How will the newspaper stand up to the quilting process?

Or would it be better to get back to painting? Experimentation continues...

Poetry Thursday - John Clare and Yvonne Skargon

Where the gay river laughing as it goes
Plashes with easy wave its flaggy sides
And to the calm of heart in calmness shows
What pleasures there abides
To trace its sedgy banks, from trouble free:
Spots Solitude provides
To muse, and happy be.

- John Clare (1793-1864) - part of Summer Images - a long poem, containing ever so many word-images of Nature, busy being itself, in all its variety.
  The excerpt, and image, were found in this book -

 with woodcuts by Yvonne Skargon (1931-2010). Here are a couple more -