Collagraph printing fun

I went to a Collagraph Workshop at Cuckoo Farm Studios last Saturday. The class was taken by Maxine Fitter, a very talented illustrator. It was just me and a friend, Norah Stocker who I met at my quilting class in Lawford.  Norah hadn’t done any collagraph prints before but I have done a couple of two-day workshops with Kim Major George at Art Van Go over the past two years.

Plate made with foil, card and wallpaper and printed once

Collagraphs, for those who don’t know, are relief printing plates made by gluing various media e.g. card, paper, tissue, glue, string, foil, seeds etc. on to a mount board base which can be further embellished by cutting into the mount board surface, scratching it or indenting the surface – basically, a textural collage.  The whole plate is then varnished with shellac or button varnish to seal the various porous surfaces.  The plate is then inked up, using cloths, brushes and rollers to apply the ink which can then be rubbed in and polished away to create the various colour and shade variations.  The plate is then normally printed on damp paper using a roller press.  Plates are often really nice art objects in their own right and, as they probably won’t survive more than half a dozen printings, they form an important result of collagraph printing.

I have previously worked with plaster, masking tape and string as well as tissue paper and seeds; some of which takes several days to dry before printing is possible. So, with just a five hour workshop, I worked with very simple media this time, cutting into the mount board surface and gluing some of the paper removed back on in different places with shapes of thin card and a little frayed hessian.  I also tried a crushed foil bun tin and some textured wallpaper.  I am really pleased with the results; I hope you like them.



Sunset at Sea - Artist's Proof





Poppies in Blue



Poppies in Blue and Gold

Poppies plate made with card, board and hessian
Printed four times

Tuscan Landscape

Back last October I holidayed in Tuscany with my family. I found the landscape there fascinating – rolling hills covered in vines, trees, and crop fields, and it inspired me to try and do something to recreate it in textiles. Being a bit of a trigger-happy photo obsessive, I took lots of pictures of the landscape, including this one from a high vantage point in San Gimignano.

Returning to the UK I did some drawings based on my various photos and mused on a number of different ways of realising it, including needlepoint (too flat), canvaswork (too boring) and felt (a possibility, especially with stitching on top). However, around that time I read Jan Beaney and Jean Littlejohn’s book ‘Over the Line’ on couching, and that was suddenly the obvious technique for realising the rows of vines and ploughed lines

The Hockney exhibition at the V&A earlier this year also provided inspiration. His work is full of rolling fields – this time in Yorkshire – but his wonderful use of colour encouraged me to be a little bolder than I usually am and so I branched out into turquoises and yellows as well as browns and greens.

The sky was a bit trickier as I didn't want the same tramlines but did want a nice sweeping open feeling. I thought the saeme sort of approach as Van Gogh's starry night might work with white and pale blues but it looked very washed out, so I unpicked that amd just used a single dark blue couched so close you can't see the supporting strand of wool. I couched over the couching to give a feel of whispy clouds.

The end result is much lusher looking than the original photo but I think I prefer it. Now I just need to mount it :-)

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