Good News! Camera cable found and more

Well my best news is that I received an email yesterday from Printfest 2010 to say I had made a successful application to take part in the event this year. It takes place at Coronation Hall, Ulverston, which I think is on Lake Coniston ... please excuse my ignorance, I am not a native Brit ... Anyway, I am very pleased about that so now I know I have something to aim at for the summer and it was OK to take the risk not to be involved with Art Tour at The Hearth. Hopefully, it will prove to be a fruitful move for me.

Coming with me is Kim Lewis who will man the Horsley Printmakers stand ... I have one to myself. She will have her own work up alongside Chris Daunt and Rebecca.

AND ... I found the camera cable so my work is now uploaded onto Flickr which you can access from this page.

Lost camera cable

This is so frustrating. I have 'lost/mislaid' the cable that connects my camera to my laptop so I can download the pictures I took of the floral monotypes I've been printing. I took it from it's usual place to download pictures onto my new laptop and I rmember saying to myself you need to put that back where it came from or you will lose it or forget where you left it. Prophectic words! Why did I not listen to myself. What am I? An EEJIT is what I am.

Floral Monotypes with Stencils

Had great fun at last night's evening class led by Mandy Pattullo. So good when someone else is doing the teaching. I learn so much and not just about the subject in hand but teaching styles and many other snippets. The pressure is off and in two and a half short hours you can't be too precious about what you are doing.

Last night I was on a roll. Not sure the prints were that fantastic, I'll have to look at them again with a fresh eye tomorrow when I'm back in the studio, but I sure as hell had fun. I cut out a series of acetates, a 20 x 20 cm plate and a 20 x 20 piece of blown wall paper - the relief kind - and just two colours Cadmium yellow deep hue and cyan.

Both colours were mixed with transparent ink as well as the solid tin colour. I began by inking up the plate with a blended rollup of the cadmium yellow deep hue and a lighter version of it. I then rolled ink onto the wall paper and pressed it on to the inked surface of the plate. This was followed by inking up each acetate with solid cadmium yellow deep on either the top or bottom along with transparent cyan at the opposite end of the acetate. The acetates were carefully placed on top of the inked plate in the correct positions.

At the start I also drew into the ink with a kebab stick and cotton earbuds but as the evening progressed I abandoned this idea to pare the image down. The first couple of prints were fairly average but I could see the potential especially once I got into working with the ghost image when i peeled off the acetates and flipped them to build up the image. I'll post jpegs tomorrow when I am back in the studio.

Biscuit Factory Selection on Wednesday

Well, on Wednesday I headed off into Newcastle at 9 a.m for a 10 a.m meeting at The Biscuit Factory to go through the work that our students submitted. One hour should have been more than enough time to get there. The journey is normally 30 minutes but as luck would have it someone broke down on the Tyne Bridge on that day and there were tailbacks on the central motorway in both directions. Fortunately, I had the radio on so I picked it up in time to take alternative route to the gallery.

So instead of arriving with time to spare, calm cool and collected, i arrived at 10.01 somewhat stressed!! The meeting however went exceptionally well. It was the first time I had seen the bulk of the work and although there were only 26 entrants as opposed to last years 43, the quality and quantity of work was great. Such a relief! Sam and Melanie were very positive about it.

The gallery has reserved the same space as last year which means most people will get to show a body of work which is wonderful. It's interesting to see how the exhibition changes subtly year on year.  

The Biscuit Factory Spring Show.

Well, just when we thought no one would be sending in any work, or very few anyway, this week there has been a last minute flurry of people turning up at the studio, portfolio in hand, to see if we thought any of their prints were good enough to go forward to the Biscuit Factory selection panel. And indeed there is a lot of work that I am confident will make it through for the show.

It's interesting though how every year the character of the show changes. I think this coming one will give many of our regular students a chance to show a larger body of work so that they and others can see how their work has developed and how an idea can be developed.

For me though I am still a little concerned that I will have enough new work to show given how I have been unable to get to the studio because of the snow so I am very behind in my preparations. On Rebecca's suggestion I am reprinting some plates that I have sold previously albeit that I always do each one in a new colour palette so no two are the same. I still hope to have at least two done from the new plates i've been making - images previously posted last week - but as yet I still have to become more familiar with the vagaries of the plate surfaces to get a print I am happy with.

I don't know if other printmakers find the same thing? I make a plate and have an idea in my head of how the final print will look and always expect to just go in and print it but it is NEVER that simple. I'm always telling my students that but I still find it deeply frustrating when it just doesn't come together straight away.

Images

Following up on my update last night I have not yet figured out how to select and upload images on the blog itself. However, I have managed to use the really nifty feature on iPhoto where you can upload images to Facebook and Flickr so if you scrawl down the page and find my Flickr widget you will see what I have been up to. These are images of the plates and first trial proofs from them. The plate size is 40 x 40 cm.

First Prints of the New Year

Well I finally managed to get to the studio this wee. We've had so much snow since the week before Christmas which made access to the studio somewhat hazardous. It has been 20 years since we've had the volume of snow we did this winter.

I was getting very anxious with the deadline for the spring exhibition at the Biscuit Factory having not made any prints since the end of November. I started on two new plates but as yet I haven't managed to get a print I'm really happy with. I'm playing around with different colour palettes and of course it always takes time to get to know the idiocyncracies of a new plate and how to bring out the best in the collagraph textures I've set up.

I have a new Apple MacBook which I am struggling to get to grips with because although i have used Apple's in the past when i worked at a graphic designer more recently I've been a PC girl. So although I have uploaded new images on to the Apple I am struggling to upload them onto here. There seems to be no means of selecting individual images just the iPhoto file which can't be right but I can't figure out any other way just now. If any of you are familiar with Apple MacBook and know how to do what I'm trying to do let me know.