Printmaking experiments

Some snapshots of a few of the prints I made during the printmaking course with Bev Truloff.

The prints in the first photograph, apart from the red collograph print, are gelatin prints. When I was told we were going to try this, I took a look on the internet to see what they were all about. I wasn't that interested in them, thought it might be a good thing to do with students. BUT when we started making these little prints the next morning I loved the process! You brush thin acrylic paint or watercolour on the gelatin plate, lay over the paper and press by hand. There is something about the fluidity of the medium on the gelatin...it is so different from using ink on a hard surface to print from. The grey print is the most liquid looking of the three in the photo, the others I'd laid paint on thickly in places to see the effect. I made a lot of these little prints, it was fun.

When I went to buy printmaking paper the shop had pretty much been cleaned out and the paper that I did buy had a texture on it that didn't lend itself very well to my printmaking. I've just bought some new paper so I'm hoping to get back to the collographs this week. The red and black prints are two collographs that I made, the red printed first and the black second. I've some ideas for exploring this idea further. The green print is a probably a monoprint - I rolled the ink on the perspex plate, and then drew into the ink by laying over a paper drawing into which I'd cut lines. The coloured image in the same photo is a mixed media monoprint with watercolour and oil based ink.