OUR SUMMER SCHOOL COURSES

Below I have uploaded all our summer school courses. If you are interested follow the links to our website courses pages and you can find further details there. Maybe we'll see you in August!

TEXTILE TECHNIQUES with Mandy Pattullo

Monday/Tuesday | 24/25 August 2009 | 10.00 - 16.00 |
If you want a non traditional approach to textiles then this is the course for you. You won’t be doing cross stitch or following a pattern but will be encouraged to develop richly embellished designs through textile techniques such as hand and machine embroidery, appliqué and fabric manipulation. If you attended the surface decoration course you can also incorporate some or all of what you created there into this course PLUS you will have exclusive access to Mandy’s private stash of colourful and interesting fabrics so you will not fail to produce some interesting results in fabric.
BOOK BY JUNE 26TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

SURFACE DECORATION with Mandy Pattullo

Saturday/Sunday | 22/23 August 2009 | 2 meetings | 10.00 - 16.00
Create unusual mixed media art works on paper and/or fabric on the Surface Decoration summer school. You will learn to paint and print with inks, use bleaching and resist techniques to get surprising effects. Use found papers to collage into the many designs you will produce using quick printmaking techniques. Many of the printmaking techniques do not require a press so you will learn lots that you will be able to continue with on the kitchen table at home! Be prepared get messy and be experimental.
BOOK BY JUNE 26TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

MAKING BOOKS AND SKETCHBOOKS with Mandy Pattullo.

Saturday/Sunday | 15/16 August 2009 | 2 meetings | 10.00 - 16.00
You don’t have to have done any printmaking to do this course however if you are one of our regular students and are producing more prints than you can hang on the wall or have “mistake” prints then turn them into beautiful books which you can treasure, exhibit or give as special gifts. You will learn simple sewing and folding techniques and will have the opportunity to make a properly bound hard backed book. Be prepared to cut up your prints, indulge in a bit of collage if you have no printmaking experience and review your ideas of what a book is.
BOOK BY JUNE 19TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

WOOD ENGRAVING & WOOD CUTS with Chris Daunt

(elected member of the Society of Wood Engravers)
WOOD ENGRAVING
Saturday/Sunday | 08/09 August 2009 | 10:00 - 16:00 | The Hearth at Horsley

Wood Engraving is a highly detailed form of relief printmaking, capable of exquisite nuance and detail, with rich, velvety blacks. The technique involves engraving on highly polished end grain blocks with a variety of gravers, and printing from the relief surface. Great care must be taken in the preparation of the drawing and the engraving of the block, but the results are always worth the effort. The method of teaching employed here is well tried. The methodical approach will serve students well in the pursuit of a medium which is simple but requires the right methodology.
BOOK BY JUNE 11TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

WOOD CUTS
Monday/Tuesday | 10/11 August 2009 | 2 meetings | 10.00 - 16.00

Wood Cuts are a form of relief printmaking not dissimilar to linocuts. It involves cutting away areas along with the natural grain of the wood on the flat side of the piece of wood not required as part of the design. The cut away areas ensure that when the completed template is inked and brought into contact with the printing surface, there is less of a chance of smearing. Careful and precise creation of the design will result in what is essentially a solid image that can be transferred onto paper, canvas or any surface that the artist wishes to use.
BOOK BY JUNE 11TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

See HorsleyPrintmakers website for details of this course and other summer courses.

LINOCUTS ON PAPER & CLAY with Carol Nunan & Melanie Hopwood

Saturday - Monday | 1- 3 August 2009 | 1 meeting | 10:00 - 16:00 |
This three day course will show you how to make simple linocut prints on paper and then clay wall pieces or 3D artworks. Using a very simple technique, two plate printing with collage the simple plates will be used to make highly sophisticated prints on day one. (They can also be used subsequently on some of the later courses.) On days 2 & 3, extend the possibilities of your linocut to create coloured clay prints using ceramic inks. Experiment with the depth and variety of texture that can result from embossing linocuts into clay. Learn or progress clay slab-building techniques to turn your prints into wall-pieces or 3D artworks. At the end of the course pieces will be fired and glazed ready to collect or post two weeks later.
BOOK BY JUNE 5TH 2009 for EARLYBIRD DISCOUNT

See Horsley Printmakers website for further details.

Three and a half weeks to Art Tour

Tomorrow I have to join Rebecca in the studio as a PR agency for The Art Tour have organised a photo-shoot of the two of us in our studio. The photos will go out with a press release about us and how we came to be working together. Theme I think is working mothers and how we fit this in around our families.

Before or after that we have to catch up with each other - difficult to do when we are never generally in on each other's studio days. There are some pressing issues that have to be resolved like our summer school leaflet which must be ready in time for the Art Tour, autumn course plan and exhibition plans post Art Tour and last but not least tackling the thorny issue of how to resolve credit and debit card payments which we currently cannot offer but which most defnintely affects level of sales every year. Last but not least we have to hang our work in The Lion & Lamb in time for the Bank holiday weekend.

Countdown to The Art Tour.

This is my domain. View of our studio as you enter ... a little untidy as I work ... but coming up for the annual spring clean to spruce the place up for The Art Tour. Final preparations are underway as we decide which prints to frame, which ones to mount only, photograph the best for cards, make cards, bookmarks, gift tags, etc. It starts to get hectic from here.

Robin Hood Tree follow up

POsted in order of printing going from top to bottom.

Playing round with ideas.

Today I started playing around with some ideas I've been turning over in my mind for a while. My recent work has been loosely or not so loosely based on the landscape with references to the archeological history above and below the ground. I've been toying with turning this on its head and making the focus of the images on the found obejects possibly with the landscape in the background and printing in layers.

In my teaching of collagraphs I usually have loads of mounting card with a variety of textures randomly pasted over the area and I recently cut these up into vessel shapes of various sizes. Today I thought I would have a play with a couple of them and print them in layers with one of my blind emobssed frames. I really need to make some new plates to carry the ideas out properly but these are work in progress. I think I can see which direction or directions I could take this.

PS. Once the camera batteries are recharged I will post up the Sycamore Gap prints from yesterday and todays' efforts. It is plugged in as we speak.

Robin Hood Tree

Otherwise known as Sycamore Gap this is a well known landmark along Hadrian's Wall. Many artists in Northumberland have reproduced this in a variety of media. I'm no exception. Boring perhaps but it is an image that does sell.

Today I was printing my plate again but as always in a diffferent colour palette. I got three prints from a half day in the studio. Would have preferred a full day but spent oo much time catching up on emails before I set off.

Anyway. the first print was OK but I was more pleased with prints 2 and 3 where I used a roll up and it just worked. I will post some pics when they are dry.

Making Booklets

I've spent this week in the studio making booklets in 4 different sizes from 11 x 11 cm size to 13 x 2o cm size - 12 of each to try out during this year's Art Tour as a sale item. The idea being to have some lower value items for sale for those visitors who would never consider forking out for an original print. The booklet covers are recycled old prints or dud prints that would never have made it onto the wall but make great covers. See for yourself

Print Fest 2 - Katsunori Hamanishi

Artist:	Katsunori Hamanishi
Title:	Silence Work - No.9
Print Type:	Limited Edition Colored Mezzotint with Gold Leaf
Series Title:	Silence Work
Edition No:	70

Whilst at The Print Fest I learnt something new today about mezzotint. The printmaker of the year was Katsuroni Hamanashi who gave an excellent demonstration of what mezzotint was all about. Here was this quint essential Japanese man complete with goatee beard talking to us entirely in Japanese (with an excellent translator) taking a room full of people through the many many intricate stages of mezzotint. The exquisite print on the left was the one he used to demonstrate with.

First was two aluminium shaped plates which were inked up, one in green , the other in yellow ochre, placed on the press bed with his registration sheet and printed.

Stage two, leaving the paper trapped in the rollers, the mezzotint plate was inked up using black ink and over printed on top of the green and yellow ochre.

Stage three, another shapped plate was inked up with a much stickier red ink which acted as a type of glue and he showed us how the delicate gold leaf was applied to the top of the print. This image doesn't do justice to the real thing.

My brain was whirling with the possibilities.

The Print Fest Ulverston

Bill - Etching by Julia Manning

Today I managed to get away to Ulverston for the day to do some research into the annual Print Fest.

Rebecca and I have been wondering if this event would be worth our while at some point in the future but have never taken the plunge. It is a lot of effort and when you consider that realistically you really have to pay for accommodation as well it pushes up costs so it has to have the best chance of being worth while?

So this Bank Holiday weekend, with Chris in Scotland, I needed a plan rather than bringing a reluctant 13 year old round with me in tow. Not good for parent/child relations. I managed to 'palm off' my off spring and set off at 9 this morning.

I found Ulverston Town Hall with relative ease with bronze of Laurel & Hardy out front and entered a packed hall full of visitors. Place abuzz with LOTS of visitors. Made good use of my time getting into several conversations with exhibiting printmakers to get their views on the success or otherwise of the event. Most who had done it before said they noticed a down turn in sales but when I later bought a print from Julia Manning (above) and went to pay at the central card paying facility the organisers reported that by Saturday night card sales had by far and away surpassed last year's entire weekend sales.

I think I picked up several potential 'guest' tutors in a variety of media that live within a reasonable distance to Northumberland and would be able to bring something different to the media we can easily teach at Horsley.