October has been a busy month. Focusing on Photoetching (again!), Screen Printing, Etching and Monotype… listed in order from most frustrating to most enjoyable haha.
I’ll start with the fun stuff! Monotype and drawing workshop with Janet Bolger at Ironpress, had an amazing time and Janet was very good at teaching me and helping me to try different things. Really happy with the prints I came out with as well, a whole new way of working to explore …..
There were lots of things I liked about this way of working, its quick, fun, forces you to simplify the image and think of it in different parts….I always struggled not to add all the detail and this definitely helps me get past that. They’re all very bold which I like and also lend themselves to my limited colour pallet!
I had a 1 to 1 intro to Etching on Aluminium at the lovely Jenny McCabe’s , I love learning from Jenny and am very thankful to her for taking the time to show me how to etch, I chose a fairly simple image taken from my favourite building: Williamsons Power Station and we worked with a simple 3 tones, again very happy with the outcome, really suits the subject matter. I already have two more lined up that I’m keen to get started on!
Next on the to-do list (and an item that’s been on that to-do list for over a year) was to screen print some Ghostbusters Firehouse t-shirts using my drawing that got picked up by the Ghostbusters guys in 2022… off to a slightly frustrating start as the screen wasn’t printing how I would have hoped.. A good learning opportunity though as Sarah at Assembly Arts diagnosed the problem and I leaned how issues in the original artwork that are hard for us to see with the naked eye can affect the screen exposure! A quick clean up in photoshop and reprint of the acetate and we were on our way 😀 20 (nearly perfect) shirts printed later and I have the screen print bug!
Lastly I managed to get some photoetching plates to come together into a fairly successful print….still troubleshooting with various images and so the saga continues… am I learning and making progress? I’m not sure…some days it feels like not, but I’m not done trying yet so hopefully next month will bring a breakthrough! I’ve also spent a bit more time attempting the bikini atoll image (which has just got bigger and bigger…these are printed on A1) again I think some improvements have been made ….. these were done using collagraph and monotype combined …. but it still doesn’t look the way it does in my head haha so I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing with these giant prints!
Overall I think October has been a very positive month! I learned a load of new stuff and had a great time doing it! What a year this is turning out to be 😀