Introducing Wee Bird. He lives in a circle.

Tomorrow planning to print wee bird. He's pretty amazing. In the interest of 'freeing the line' I have given him one massive franken foot.

Going to cut down my long off cut strips into squares and do some wee bird mini prints. Wondering if it's possible to print two colour ways next to each other at once - If you kept the pace up... something to find out about.

Few screen grabs from tonights desicision making below. And now I am going to bed before 2 in the morning. Genius. I'm ignoring the fact it's still 00:58am...

A little bit of parrot magic.

Going a lot better this week after the Pigeon crash and burn. Still sleepy but feeling less mental. Decided to go back to a parrot illustration of mine that I'd printed as an etching a year ago. I like the drawing and being newish to etching I couldn't manipulate the colours the way I wanted to.

I took the discarded mini ink blob pattern from the magic cow and layered it up on an enlarged ink brush stroke. With the black feathers overlayed it created a nice effect. Also using acetate registration tabs instead of paper for first time this week, huge difference in lining up the different layers -  that's another technique for keeps.

  Computer print out for printing reference - stop me from exposing images backwards again....

 Colour mixing - do like a bit of tangerine!

 First layer down, smooth sailing. Although 10 min before this I did mess up my black layers exposure. I left screen in the exposure bed while it was warming up and it managed to expose every miniscule scatch on the glass surface onto my screen. End result bit like a very detailed road map with a surprised parrot in the middle of it... Had to wash that one out...

 Tangerine layer 2 on screen.

 Didn't even notice the edge had mis printed on the top print until I looked at this photograph.. oops.

Final black layer down - Final colour print! Woop! Without any mini crisis! 

 Close up - paper is not yellow - just funny studio lighting.

Decided to do some all black one colour prints too. Very different look for the same image.  

Museum of childhood toy horse.

Stayed up til two messing around with a mini horse toy from V&A Museum of Childhood. Way to tired too make it look good. Eventually admitted defeat, stuck it in the 'think about later' folder and walked away. Think it needs more horses or an actual composition would be helpful too... 

New magic cow colourway

Printing the magic cow.

Got the train back from Rye in the morning, quick dash back to the flat from St Pancras to swap case with bag of paints and straight back out again to head for the Studio. Swung past the print shop to get my positives printed, first fail of the day/another lesson learned - you can't print full bleed - 5mm cut off. Bummer... couldn't print the A3 Image on A2 instead as they didn't stock acetate in that size... I'd only just ordered the mini paper the morning before and had no idea if it had even arrived. Printed small version with fingers crossed for a paper delivery. Managed to stay calm. Then got half way down the high street to the print studio and realised I'd left my big bag of paint and memory stick at the print shop.. not a good start. :)


Got in eventually and someone fixed the counter balance on the bed I was working on for me. Happy days, no more bruised shoulder holding it up while loading paper or being on constant alert for the wooden stick slipping and getting smacked on the back of the head.

 Yellow layer: Super tight registration. Made sure I had everything ready this time before getting started. No 'oh shit I forgot to make the registration tabs!' moments with ink down on the screen. First full bleed print. Wanted to give it a whirl. Apparently it's easier to print on bigger paper and cut down to the edge... oh well...

 Second layer down with no major problems :) I'd forgotten that overlaying colours changes them.. gives print a three colour effect with blue on yellow in the centre.

 The joys of the scrap paper box!! Cow over surprise penis pattern! Sent this one to my mum :) She was amused if a little surprised. Told her I'd added a little extra last minute detailing.

One colour version. Can't make up my mind if this is better.


Finished printing at nine, headed into town to grab something to eat and had cow pulled out for examination at the dinner table. Not good - apparently colours are wrong, head too small, is it a transgender cow?? Confusing male and female attributes. It went on... Magic cows are apparently not to everyones taste.

Rye day two - frames and magic cow composition.

Picked up a nice frame for my cat print in the morning, vintage frames are the way forward if you can get them for the right price. Just paying for assembly and to get a mat cut is a lot less financially stressful.  Got an email the night before offering me a place in a Christmas studio sale in Stoke Newington on the 7th of December :) Pretty happy about that, ordered some smaller paper to do some simpler mini prints that I'm thinking will be good for gifts.

Got back to work on the cow from where I left off a month ago.....

 

 New composition idea but desperately in need of a better shape. Looked up some Indian miniature paintings and went back to original photo of cow on Italian bible in Pisa.

New shape with some fold the paper in half and grab some scissors magic.

 

I wanted some kind of detailed textured background and decided to start drawing tiny ink shapes. Thought I'd be done in half an hour.

 Half an hour later

 An hour later.

1 & half hours of squiggles....... fail.

 Way too busy!

Did some bigger ones as well - pretty ugly too.

 

Merged the two squiggle layers for a more pleasing result.

Ditched the crazy ass zig zags and tried a three colour layering.

Much better as a two colour print.

 Possibly only a one colour. 1.45 in the morning again - crawled off to bed.

Down to Rye to get my head together with a sideline in making horrible things.

Decided to head down to my mums for two days to try and chill out a bit. Did some crazy packing at 1am and ended up taking the kitchen sink with me for 2 nights. Had to get some drawing done to print again on Friday having re booked a session and decided to bin the chicken pigeon.

Got reacquainted with Poumpee.

Who was being her usual helpful self.

Went out and about for a bit to check out the local gallery. Some pretty pimp looking screenprints on display. Not a mis registration in sight - had a bit of a mini internal wobbler with recent pigeon cock up in the back of my mind but got over it.


Didn't get any pics of the screenprints too close to the desk but took a few of the lino prints up stairs.

I like the idea of collaging a base layer before printing over the top. The artist has used foil here which I'm not sure would work if you were using water based inks. Thinking of playing around with it though, bit like chine colle prints I had a look at when I did a etching course a year back. 

 Nice colours in this painting. I love orange especially when it's tangerine.

 Some nice mini houses.

Went back to the house and toyed with a cow head from the British Museum for a bit, until Fiona (the mother) said it looked like it was suffering from flowery flatulence. Great.

Instead I moved on to creating something truly horrendous. 

BLEUGH!!!!!!!!!


Went back to the winged cow, managed a crappy mock up before giving up for the day mainly because tasty fish dinner was on the cards.