Week 20 - Printing

This week at college we started with printing for our shapes topic. We began by making our printing blocks out of self-adhesive foam stuck onto off-cuts of mount board. It was quite difficult to cut the foam accurately.

To prime the block and stop it from disintegrating we painted the whole thing with acrylic paint and let it dry before experimenting. These are the blocks I made and my test sheet to see how they came out.

Then we got printing. I decided to restrict my colours to black, orange and magenta so as to focus on the shapes and patterns.

Here I put a wash of yellow Brusho over the acrylic prints once dry.

I like the way that when you print more than once from the same layer of paint you get see-through overlaps.

I tried combining the shapes to make new ones. Overall I loved doing this and will definitely do more in the future.

Then we moved onto a Stitch Challenge in the last part of the class. Using a random selection method we were given a stitch and its characteristics to create a small sample of hand stitch. Mine was 'Bokhara couching - irregular - diagonal'. Bokhara couching is where you stitch down a thread with small slanting over-stitches. I didn't get very far so I will have to finish it  and post a photo next week.

At home I have been concentrating on completing my texture and shape design work.

This is the first page of my Shape Book. When assembled it will resemble an origami star, hence the diagonal folds on some of the pages.

The book has to show the use of:

• random and geometric lines to make shapes and patterns 
• manipulation of regular and irregular shapes to make patterns
• exploration of the void between shapes
• the understanding of how 2D shapes make 3D forms.

Above top left is an experiment with a Paint programme on the computer - if it's good enough for David Hockney...! 

Top right reminded me of being a child again, where I loved colouring in Altair Design Pads to make patterns on holiday, but I didn't learn anything new.

Bottom left is my photo of a pylon hand coloured with Brusho and marker pen. I think this is really striking and you can hardly recognise that it is a pylon.

Bottom right takes inspiration from a found image of a building where I repeated the same 2 blocks in columns, keeping the bottom block constant and changing the pattern in the top block. Some interesting new shapes and patterns emerged this way.

Page 2 opposite features my previous blackwork created using machine patterns and my printing from above.

Page 3 shows exploration of tesselation and counterchange using Escher prints as inspiration.

Page 4 looks at the void between shapes. I doodled the pattern top right and coloured in the void with marker pen. Then I wondered if I could create something similar by printing with white acrylic and putting a black wash over with Brusho. It produces quite an interesting result.

Finally I included my card net for my embroidered box, which happens to be made out of gold card. I had to hold it flat with a split pin pushed through a sheet of backing card so I covered this with a scan of the actual fabric I used on my box.

Inside the card net I stuck the photo of the inside of my box - lucky that I took a nice clear photo of this when it was still flat. I love that this is so unexpected when you open up the box.

Next I need to make the book covers and assemble it - see photos next week.

Finally to finish off the presentation of my texture work I have mounted it all onto stone-shaped pieces of backing card.

Here is how the monoprints look. Some of them are plain and some have been layered with printed acetate or sweet wrappers or both. I gave them a black edging with a marker pen to make it look like they were slices of polished agate.

These will be displayed in my paper pulp bowl for final assessment.