Drawing a Day 129 - City Pigeon in Felt Tips.

Drawing a Day 122 - Fan Tailed Dove for Cyanotype Test.

Drawing a Day 30 - Penguin Party!

Today I won a children's book on the internet! Woop!! Yes I'm not a child, but still, I havn't won anything in yonks! And by that I mean years & years! Here's the penguins that brought me my win doing a celebratory dance in my honour. Life - It's the small pleasures that count.

Printing green and brown Wee Bird colourways

Went down to Rye for my Mum's birthday weekend. Had a lot of fun stomping around on chilly beaches picking up lots of Flotsam and Jetsam. Gave myself a rash picking up one particularly funky piece next to the nuclear power station. Will update with few pics once I can get my photo's back. Had to borrow a camera after my phone came to a creaking data halt complaining about having to store my 5,200 photos.

Back to Studio on Monday. Screens had been put away for me which was super helpful, but had unfortunately been paint bombed at some point during the weekend with massive gold splodges all over one of them. That's one way to remember to never leave your screen out. Wasted 2 hours blasting the gold off and re exposing only to find couple of long scratches across the mesh too. Don't know what had happened while I was away but my screen has been through the wars. Real bugger as it was my nice new screen that got hit not my pigeon shadowing one.

Green Wee bird body down. Got a bit carried away with the green and didn't leave many sheets for Brown Wee bird - bit of a shame as the brown came out better than I'd thought it would.

Black layer down, slightly fiddly registration but all came good in the end.

Finito!

48 hour pigeon power!

Printed for 6 hours on the Thursday, finished the cat print with a bit of bonus time on a spare bed. Got home at 10pm with 6 hours printing the next day and no artwork ready to go. Stayed up til 2 drawing/prepping an emergency pigeon and managed to print all four layers for around 35 prints by 6 o clock the next day. Win!

Pencil work

Black layer.

Drawing white layer - inking up - feather head. 

Reference print out 2am - tired.

 First colour blend in four years.

Layer 2 - pink feet and eye.

White on white layer 3 on screen. 

White feathers. Registering on acetate. 

White on white close up. Super subtle but nice in the flesh.

Layer 4 black.

Packing up.
 

Final print.

Finished Crow Prints

Printing the crows.

The crows were a little ambitious for the third week I'd been in the print studio. I went for A2 in line with my general work moto -  'if in doubt make it massive'. 

I didn't realise how tricky big plains of flat colour are to pull off. Ended up using the arm on a bigger screen printing bed as it definitely wasn't happening with me hand pulling it. 

Next layer after that and my registration was going off between one tiny bit of the beetle and the crows. Whole process stressful with a lot of expensive mistakes. Out of 30 or so prints I've ended up with around 6 good ones. 

Oh well you live and learn. 

 Printing on the big bed with highly technical wooden stick prop. Weight of the arm stops the counter balance from working. 

It's always nice when mistakes look like monsters. 

After this I threw away my last bit of hand mixed pink. Big mistake, meant that I couldn't cover any accidential flecks of paint from prints hanging around the studio or little marks that cropped up when printing the other layers over the top. Fail. 

Registration fails and ink drying into screen as I wasn't being quick enough - Nightmare. Walked away.

 

Top crow layer on scrap. Smooching with Mr Hitchcock. 

Crows all good (apart from the ones with no feet). Just missing the beetle.

Beetle finished in one session. Hand registered everything with acetate. Got lent some iridescence for the wings :)

Terrible indecision and melt downs over composition or because sometimes I'm terrible at making decisions without asking 15 people first.

Crows drawn and ready to go I collapsed into a total meltdown of indecision. I'd drawn some birds, what the hell was I supposed to do with them now? Stick them in the middle of a page?? Wasn't that what people usually did? In this week composition was a dirty word. 

My melt down was also partially due to the fact that I was trying to keep the crows a secret from my brother. I'm terrible at keeping secrets and cutting myself off from the one person I'm constantly harassing for their aesthetic opinion was not a good combination. The crows were also swinging wildly away from original idea of a very muted terribly sophisticated print and I'd started adding tunnocks teacakes to the mix.... not good.

Here's a step by step breakdown in pictures.

Finally a decision. I caved and showed my brother, told him it was going to be two weeks late for his birthday and gave him some spoons instead..... fail.