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Hi,

I am a member of the Artists Society of Canberra Fun With Printmaking Workgroup and today I started my printing rather late in the day as I had to attend an open day at M16 Artspace in Canberra, which is where our printmaking group meets.

I didn’t get underway until about 4.30 pm and  started out by hand pulling some small lino cuts in different colours, then did one lino print of a larger size.  After that I couldn’t help but get stuck into playing with my gelli plate.  During the last week I had scoured junk shops looking for items I could use with the gelli plate and came home with a load of rubbish, and I was dying to test out what I’d found.  Amazing how being an printmaker or mixed media artist turns us all into hoarders and rubbish collectors – we end up scouring the streets for trash – bits of metal, twine, anything we can use to make a  picture or a print.  Anyway, things didn’t go as well as I hoped, probably because I was short of time and rushing to get stuff done,  but I still had fun, as always.  Love lino cuts and love my gelli plate!  Following are a few of the images I printed. I would have put more, but am having some trouble uploading them, so these will have to do.

The blue images were all made using the gelli plate, hand pulled using Speedball water based ink.

This lino print was printed over the top of another lino print. Under print was Speedball inks, overprint was hand pulled using Dervan black  block ink.  Had to use plenty of ink as  it was on a textured paper and the under print made it had to get a good print using just hand pressure.

This is the same lino cut, which I finished carving this week.  I like to do tangles and I decided to do a tangle on a piece of lino and then carve it.  The was hand pulled using the Speedball inks.  The tree lino cuts were printed over the top of some ghost prints.

I printed the lino print in a few colours to see what it looked like, and tried some different types of papers too.  It is much harder to print onto thicker and textured paper – I prefer to use the thinner Japanese printing papers for doing hand pulled prints.

I did this lino cut quite a while ago, but had never done many prints from it, so today I dragged it out and did one, plus a ghost print.  It is called “Transformation”  and is part of a series relating to how our planet and all life on it is transformed by the action of sunlight and water.

Some of the ghost prints (above) also turned out OK, I even prefer some of them to the originals.

Well that’s it for me for Print Day in May.  Cheers from Canberra Australia.