After my ‘freeing’ experience in the woodcutting and painting workshop last week I decided to get out my rarely used Brusho paints and try to roughly produce some images of horses. This was to be a quick exercise, with no angst – just something to retain what I’d learned and give it a go at home.
I soon found that horses aren’t meant for quick sketching, unless you’re an accomplished artist that is.
OK, that was interesting. They’re not what I want but at least it got me moving (I think I should practice this more often). I went back to my pencils and some of the photos and images of horses I’ve accumulated.
Right, the painting wasn’t good but it did free up my hands and, having drawn horses several times now, I’ve got more of an idea what I want to come out with – something stylised, simplified and still retaining the look of the carousel. Why am I doing this when I’ve already finalised my design (see post dated 5/11/15)? Well, it’s to do with the niggling feeling I have re the designs I’ve worked on to date.
I copied the page above into Photoshop and started moving the components around and resizing them.
I was pleased with this result, so traced the image and transferred it to lino, adding detail as I went. I then took some proof prints adding slightly more detail with additional cutting between prints. All prints use blue/black oil based ink mix + 50% extender.
Above: sample on brown packing paper.
Above: sample on 110gsm cartridge paper.
Above: sample on shiny plastic coated Australia Post Jiffy bag paper (about 110-120gsm). Intriguing. I thought the slick paper surface would pick up every tiny bit of ink but that’s not the case. You can clearly see white blotches on the horses where the ink stayed on the lino. I don’t know why this happened but the effect adds more interest to my design. 
In addition, the colour is exactly the same mix as the previous prints but the result is far more blue. Could the shiny paper surface have some kind of an illuminating effect that brings out the colour better?
The swirls on this sample were made on the same shiny paper and I remember thinking at the time (click here to see blog post) how vibrant the colours were.
Above: sample on 110gsm cartridge paper. I transferred a ‘wash’ of very translucent blue ink first and then applied the lino print over the top, wet-on-wet. This was just to test how well one layer sits on top of another without waiting for drying time (using different strengths of ink) and also to see how much of my initial monoprint layer will be visible. I’m very pleased with the proportions at this stage.
Above: sample on pale yellow Kozo paper. The paper colour really can’t be appreciated from the photo and it has given the ink a very slight greenish tinge, only slightly but enough to demonstrate a difference from the other results.
Overall, I’m much more comfortable with this design and it works well in my preferred method of simplification, flattening of image and stylization.
TactualTextiles 