Inside my Sketchbook #1

I have been on a really big drawing kick lately, particularly flowers and I thought I would start a series on the blog sharing with you all what is in my sketch book.

Drawing is always something that I have enjoyed but it's something that I never really seem to have the time to sit down and draw any more, so I have decided that I am going to start taking some time (10 minutes or so) every other day and just draw.

Print Experiment #3

Ok so you are all probably getting sick of seeing flowers on this blog now, but I have a couple more posts on them to come and then I think I will put them to rest.... at the end of the day I can't go on printing flowers forever right? even I'll get sick of them after a time.

These are the last few prints that I have created for The Boutique Market Christmas Fayre on Sunday 1st Dec, as it's my first Christmas and craft fayre I wanted to make sure that I had a variety of prints to take with me. I know it's all going to be flowers, trees, owls (and maybe a robin or 2) but in the time that I have had to produce the prints I haven't really been able to explore other 'themes' or 'subjects' (please remember that I do work full time as a designer so that only leaves me an hour or so in the evenings and a sunday to do any printwork). However I do have some new ideas that I want to explore in the coming weeks (and they don't involve trees, flowers or birds!) so make sure you keep an eye out.

You'll probably notice that I have used pretty much the same colours in all of my prints, the idea behind this was to use colours that related to actually colour of the flowers that I used for each of the prints. Just thought I'd add that in.

New screen Prints

I have been busy recently doing a lot of printing done in preparation for my first craft fayre in a weeks time and to also put some new item into my Esty Shop (this will probably be updated in early december).

After a couple failed attempts I have finally set up another screen to do some different prints from the ones in earlier post, as you can see the trees have made a comeback for the craft fayre (though just like the owl this will be the last run of trees that I print)

Printing Experiments #2

Here are some more print experiments that I'm trying out for my shop and craft fayre. I do have another screen set up ready to go with some other flowers and a couple of tree may have made a comeback.......

this is not the same image from the previous post, the one in the previous post was metallic red (it actually looks more pink than red) over black whereas the one above is violet over metallic red.

Screen Printed Flower

On the weekend I decided to take a full day to do some printing (something that I haven't been able to do in while), it was also a chance for me to try out my new silk screen and my new (small) studio space at home. A couple of weeks ago I scanned all my flower monoprints so I could make them bigger and print them out to put onto a screen.

To start I decided to use one of my fuchsia prints and a leaf print, however alot of the detail from the leaf didn't transfer well onto the screen but the flower came out fine. The original print of the fuchsia fits onto an A6 card so for these prints I made the flower bigger so it would fit onto A5.

I decided to experiment a bit and start printing different colours on top of one another, I think the end result will look quite good (though I think the black is a bit too harsh in this image so I will probably keep to neutral colours)

How I print pressed flowers

I know printing pressed flowers is pretty easy, after all you need is some pressed flowers, ink and paper and your ready to go, but it can be very time consuming as the flowers are very delicate and they only tend to last for 3 or 4 prints (if your lucky). I've tried a couple of different ways of printing the flowers, first of all I tried gently pressing the flower onto the roller to apply the ink and secondly I tried gently applying the ink using a paint brush, (however the hairs on the brushes ended up pulling at the flowers).

The method that I found works best is to just apply the flower straight onto the ink try and gently pat the flower so that it gets a some what even coverage of ink and the gently pull it of the tray and place it onto the paper.

Place the flower onto the ink tray

Gently press the flower into the ink

Peel the flower off the tray trying not the rip the flower

Place the flower onto the card/paper

Cover the flower with a scrap piece of paper and then either rub over it with your hand or use a roller to roll of the flower to create the print

Remove the paper and the flower and you are left with a print of the flower

It normally take a few attempts at getting the print to look how you want it, for example in this print you can see that there id slightly too much ink on some of the petals, so for the next print I just printed straight from the flower with what ever ink was left instead of apply anymore.

Printed Flowers #3

This is going to be the last of the printed flowers for a while, I have used up a lot of the flowers I had pressed and as it is coming into autumn and winter a lot of the flowers now are starting to die off and I want to start taking this project forward. (Though I do have some leaves that I have still yet to print). I will continue to look for some more flowers to print over the next few months but for now these are the final flower monoprints.

It's clear from the prints that I have done that fuchsia's print the best, I think that because it's a larger flower than the others it was easier to apply a couple of coats of ink without the flower breaking really quickly and it's the one flower that I feel printed with the most amount of detail.

Inspiration # 6 - Flower pressing / Botanical

Here is some of the images that have inspired my current project, I know it seems the wrong time of year to have become interested in pressing and printing flowers as a lot of the flowers will start to disappear in the next few weeks but hopefully I can get a few more flowers together to print before the winter (and most likely snow) set in and the plants have gone.

Below is a selection of images that I found while browsing through pinterest