An Afternoon with my Gelliplate .......

This week I spent an afternoon printing with my gelliplate!   I tried some experiments and worked  on printing some fat quarters of fabric for the next grevillea design ....

The experiments were inspired by a short online class with Carla Sonheim,  that I purchased recently. 

Carla's technique produces some lovely abstract monoprints with a landscape feel so I was keen to try it out.  Here are some of the results ......

I think  these have a lot of possibilities as backgrounds for a new idea I have .......

The fat quarters for the new grevillea design are printed using grevillea leaves and a couple of abstract stamps.  I wanted a subtle, blended print without too much contrast,  to use in the background.  Printing fat quarters means repeated placement of the gelliplate and sometimes this results in a build up of paint in some areas.  I tried lightly washing off the excess which worked very well and helped with the blended effect I was looking for .......

A good afternoons work I think!

Thanks for reading ......CC

New WindingWay Landscape

This new piece has been reworked a few times .... I was pretty happy with the landscape background but struggled to find a fabric for the overlay.  In addition,  this piece at 16" x 16"  is larger than the previous works in this series so that added an extra challenge for the composition!!

                                 'Winding Way in Pink'  © CarolynCollinsArt 2017  16" x 16"

The larger size of this piece called for a rethink which resulted in the addition of some new elements ... a more complex landscape background and in this piece a digital image printed on organza which adds  a nice sense of depth.  

I thought it would be interesting to look at the development of this series to date ... starting with the first compositions at the bottom left   ......

The next step is to develop and refine  this larger design .......

Thanks for reading ...........  CC

Translation to Fabric

Its the end of Term 3 of drawing class and I've been looking over the work we did.  

Two classes stand out because they lots of fun and because I am thinking the approaches used could translate into fabric and make very interesting backgrounds

The first involved an excursion to a local creek and walking track ....

.....  here we collected natural materials from around the site .... grasses, bark, twigs, stones and seedpods ..... whatever took our attention and these were laid on our paper ... to act as natural stencils.  We sprinkled them with graphite powder and then sprayed with acrylic inks and then left them to dry before drawing the landscape using just charcoal and sanguine.

This dual connection between the found materials and the landscape produced some lovely results.  Here is my effort .. doesn't look too much like the actual landscape!!! 

The second class that offered  translation potential involved 4 panels and 4 compositions made up of shapes and inspired by  foliage of our choice .

Each panel had to work as a composition as did the combined panels.  

Dark and light tones were added and then combinations of color to provide the mid tones.

This process produced some very interesting abstract compositions that seem to have the potential to translate easily into fabric.

I  chose Magnolia leaves for the foliage and was very pleased with the composition of shapes in the 4 panels.  Here is my work so far..... although not happy with the colors however I can see potential ....

I'm keen to try some more  combinations and variations of tone and color and over the break  will experiment with these ideas and see where it leads.......