fine liner back in action

fine liner on paper

I have just survived a wonderful week of failed van - no car - and an almost melt down of electrics at the house.... nothing totally calamitous just events to mess up the week and slow everything down!  It did mean I got organised and did some proper drawing at home and have set up a good and potentially productive work space which produced work!!

Then we had family visit and this entailed me having to be  hospitable and not hiding in my work room drawing and sewing all day - fortunately I have more or less caught up this weekend.

I have spent a lot of the week drawing the exterior of the Bowes museum to use as a screen print template - I have used a couple of photographs I took,  enlarging them and then cropping them to use the front part of the house.  I drew them free hand using a fine liner and light box, and having had a practice run I did them again using a ruler for very clear lines - I like both versions but think the more formal straight lines suit the majesty and opulence of the building.

3 minute continuous line fine liner on paper

I am using the Bowes Museum collection of porcelain ornaments of animals for inspiration - which to be honest is hard as most of them are fairly not my cup of tea... I have picked the most peculiar ones  or the ones with the most garish decoration and colour... some of them are bordering on imaginary creatures which are the ones that grab my attention. I've done lots of line drawing and then I have scanned them in and  photo shopped them to have a little play with resizing layering and changing the hues and saturation.

Being back on Photoshop again (aaaggghhh) has actually not been too bad - I;m having to seriously brush up on my rusty skills but seem to have learnt one lesson that is finally sticking!!!! when is not working check you are on the right layer!!! simple but effective!!!  Remembering this make a tremendous difference!

Being a little bored with just playing with black and white I copied some drawings and then had a little experiment with adding colour using promarkers - my preferred medium for adding intense colour to smaller pieces.

prepping for screen print samples

Most of my work at the moment is line work prepping for screen printing over the next couple of weeks,these prints are mainly for samples to experiment with different kids of ink and layer techniques.  I'm in the middle of putting together an A1 koda trace for a screen print partly free hand and partly digital images - I'm using lots of different mediums to draw with - fine ink, china-graph pencils acrylic paint - it will be interesting to see the results when i finally do the dreaded screen prints next week.

I'm also going to have another shot at laser cutting and expect to play a bit more with dying fabrics.. BRING IT ON!!