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. 

Birthday Crows

Decided to do some moody depressing crows for my Brother's birthday, taking inspiration from his special brand of lonely crow on dead tree photography in black and white.

Started out well with my usual budget ideas sketch. They have the advantage of being unrecognisable to casual observers so no one can dissuade me from going ahead.


Started playing around using reference photo's to create possible compositions.

Did go steadily down hill from there with some seriously dodgy initial crow drawings.

Here I've given the crow a strange disney head, with dimples and chubby cheeks.
 

Having succeeded in drawing a mucky, twisted, freaky perspective crow that was all wrong, I moved on to accidentally drawing a crow that looked like a seagull. 

This is what would happen if a crow and a seagull ever managed to get it on..... Beak, head, whole shape - all wrong. Plus adding ink didn't make it any more hardcore.