I spent the second week of Easter preparing cardboard collagraphs of trees for printing. I spent Tuesday and Wednesday this week printing the first and I intend to continue with this plate next week. I haven’t got very far with it as I wanted to intaglio print from it and when I wasn’t satisfied I relief printed with it too. So it’s become a longer process than I intended, as I have to ink each piece up twice. Annoyingly as I was preparing to leave on Wednesday I had one piece of paper left over so I ran the plate back through the press without inking it up and the print was much nicer than the strong images I’d been producing. It didn’t occur to me earlier to do this as the I thought the image needed strong colours but in fact run through a second time makes it look delicate, not what I was looking for at all, but it works so well. Now that I’ve had time to think about it I think it’s more in fitting too with the idea behind the subject, of what we are losing by felling trees.
So I feel I’ve wasted those two days really. At least next week I’ll get more done if I only need to ink up the plate every other time it gets printed. Anyway I’m really happy with the design and at last I feel everything is coming together!
The tree rings came along quite well over Easter but have come to a stand still now, but if push comes to shove I can get them finished over the summer ready for the fellowship show. And the same with the Forest really. I have completed one of the tree ring pieces though and am happy with the finished look except that it’s too small. It was the largest one I have so I know now that I need to keep building it up for much longer, that one will have to be the smallest of the collection I guess.
I've got too much on at the moment but at some point when the fellowship is over I’d like to do something about ladybirds. In 2004 a ladybird that is native of eastern Asia called a harlequin became a resident in Britain and it is spreading in number very fast which is a threat to our native ladybirds. I have no idea what I could do with this but that's for future me to work out.
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