Print Outcomes.

Martha Dryden Legg Dad
Bessie & Norman
Hubby Martha-Louise

I am truly delighted with the way these have turned out and frankly rather embarrassed by the number of oos and aahs they are provoking in the studio but, I suppose that helps me to evaluate them less subjectively. I pinned them up on the wall next to my studio space (they’ll take ages to dry and the drying rack is full). I must admit, I was quite startled by seeing them from the outside of the studio window when I was stuck at the traffic lights this morning. The series certainly seems to have impact.

A startling array.

Never mind how startled I was, …… nothing compared to my husband’s face (no clue about the prints in production) when his image suddenly appeared on Instagram! #foundation.carlisle

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Production line ? #printmaking

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#printmaking ? #UALAwardingBody

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Quite surprising to see yourself like this online!

Extension Activities.

  1. I have been asked (told) to think about how one might mount/present/hang these, following a lengthy but spontaneous ‘crit’ with PT and KT about them.
  2. Learning the force of ‘the hovering hand’ : KT has found it difficult to restrain herself from ‘dabbling’ in this print process ha! ha! Oh well there you go – the down-side of teaching lol. But words emanated from the mind that was controlling ‘the hovering hand’ and her comments resulted in me doing some ‘scrapping’ off the ‘spent’ printing plates – sort of frottaging bits of them with a baren.

This playful extension may have been a bit inspired by the frottage I did of each board before printing from them. It seemed a nice way to preserve the virgin plates in a bit more interesting way than captures from the photocopy platen.

‘Frottage’ – what an hilarious word.

Workshop: Photoshop -outcomes.

I feel that these have been successful in achieving a liminal effect using the layering and rubbing away palimpsest idea – representing the boundary between life and death. It has been a very time consuming process with a lot of decisions to be made about exact levels of opacity after the pixel level image editing. PT has given helpful support and little nudges in the right directions… particularly about font choice, colour etc and, finally in a discussion about the paper stock to use for printing.

Final Workshop: Photoshop 4th-5th October

I prepared a set of image files to take into workshop, material that I have decided to experiment with for my book. Since, last post, my ideas have been taking a more tangible form in my mind so I went into workshop armed with the deed scans, some images of elder flowers and berries, my poem script and some pictures of the landscape at home. The first few workshop activities were within my familiarity with Photoshop (I have used it for several years now) but I followed them through at the beginning just to find my way around the Mac environment and the CS6 version mounted there …. mine being a humble CS3 on Windows at home!

These pictures reference the themes I am including in my book. They include pictures of the landscape at mine, elders that I have grown, and a beautiful picture my husband took of the outflow of the waterfall at the bottom of our property, where it flows over the limestone. It is his favourite place. Also here is the illustration my Dad made to illustrate the poppies and blue flowers prose poem he wrote. My intention is to manipulate these images – going back to the palimpsest idea from early research to combine them with layers of text from my poem, the deed prints and text that my husband used in our orders of service when we got married – a medieval courtly love poem called The Iam Dulcis.