Vancouver Island Art Workshops - Jane Davies - Part 2

Back to the workshop and the final three days.....

Starting day 3 we had a choice of switching to our 'good' paper  (a good printmaking paper) or doing a few more prints with the drawing paper. I choose to switch to my printmaking paper - Stonehenge. I really like the Stonehenge for this type of monoprinting. Jane wanted us to experiment with the techniques we had been using the previous two days - especially the masking of shapes and texturing. It was important not to have a plan and to work more with our intuition and notice things such as similar values, lights/darks, shape size and saturated colour versus neutrals. Once these were dry we added a background ('ground') to the print. Lots of choices to think about here. Do you leave a space between shapes and ground, how will the shapes relate to the ground and what colour for the ground. By putting in the ground it makes it easier to see what you have. We could still print and collage over the ground if we wanted. Painting the ground takes a lot of time and care. I mixed two or three colours for my grounds so I would get some variation in the colour.

There are a lot of things to think about when working on these pieces...
1. Contrast of scale
2. Variation in value
3. Transparency/Opacity
4. How much white space to leave around shapes - thickness and thinness of lines
5. Do you leave white space
6. Placement of shapes - ex. do they go off the edge, overlapping
7. How much do you enhance the shapes - a little or a lot
8. What is the 'top/bottom' of the print. Jane usually decides this earlier on - is intuitive for her.
9. Will your ground be all one colour or one side yellow the other purple

For the remainder of the workshop we worked on the following
1. Printing then collaging, painting the ground and line work
2. Printing grids and then collaging and painting
3. Printing grounds and printing, painting and collaging over them.

These are a couple of printed starts that I am looking forward to working on.

Multiple printings and masking off of parts of plate and masking  using a shape. Lots to do with this start!

Rolled titanium white over residue on gelli plate and printed. You can see previous printed shapes and colours. Looking forward to working on this one

Printed ground with printed and collaged shapes,
added paint and some line work

Printed grid with collage, added paint,
some stencilling and line work

Started with printed ground using a lot of
layering and masking of the background.
Added collaged shapes and paint

So this is a very brief description of techniques covered in this workshop. For me the gelli plate encourages experimentation and pushing limits as much as you can with this tool. Having spent 5 days 'monoprinting' has inspired me to do some printmaking at home. I am going to 'dust' off my etching press and enjoy experimenting with some monoprinting.

Vancouver Island Art Workshops - Jane Davies Workshop - Part 1

I have just returned home from Vancouver Island, British Columbia. I was attending a 5 day workshop with Jane Davies. The subject of the workshop was 'Monoprint Collage: the Dynamics of Working in Series'. The workshop was organized by Vancouver Island Art Workshops. Mary Stewart and her husband Jim put a tremendous amount of time and effort into this workshop. The facility was well appointed, two big tables for each participant to work on and lots of refreshments and food. Mary also had several prize draws and gave us each a bottle of Dick Blick 'Celadon' acrylic paint (a favourite colour of Jane's) and a tube of acrylic paint from Kroma Artist's Acrylics.

I had purchased some of  Kroma Artist's Acrylics for this workshop. This is the first time I have used this brand of acrylic paint and I really like it. It printed well using the gelli plate and the colours are rich! Have put these on the the 'art supply' wish list.

I had taken Jane's online monoprint workshop so I knew there would be some repetition over the first couple of days and I was looking forward to the idea of working in a series and getting feedback and ideas/suggestions on how to move forward with my work.

Day 1 and 2 were spent making making a variety of collage papers using the GelliArts gel plate. The paper we used is approximately an 80lb  drawing paper. You can get some gorgeous papers layering colour, patterns and textures. We needed a variety of hues, values, high contrast and low contrast papers. We layered tone on tone, pattern on pattern, opaque and transparent. You could go on forever. For texturing - string, corrugated cardboard, texture plates - you are only limited by your imagination! We also started cutting masks and using stencils to create some interesting effects.

The afternoon of day 2 we spent experimenting with printing and collaging on the 80lb drawing paper.

Here is a very small sampling of some of the papers made during day 1 & 2.

Tone on tone

Phthalo turquoise mixed with glazing medium on plate, rolled out with brayer and printed

Patterned paper made with multiple colours of blue and multiple stencils/masks

Tone on tone paper, using texture plates

Some of my favourite papers were those I used to clean my brayer off on and some rolling titanium white out on the residue left on the plate and then printing.

Using titanium white over residue on plate and
pulling the print. The curved shape had been
printed on the paper first using a mask

Stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow!