Enjoying some Fine Weather

Dry and warm enough for me to cycle without getting frozen fingers today so I did a short circular route from Croome Park, taking in Pirton, Stonehall Common and Wadborough.  Only 14 miles, but not bad with the 23 miles I did on Sunday out towards Upton past Clive's Fruit Farm.  The sun even managed to shine for a short while. Swapped the scone for a chocolate brownie with my cup of coffee when I got back to Croome and had stowed my bike back in the car.

It all made up for the catastrophe at home of the rotary washing line dumping a line full of wet clothes onto the garden twice before I realised that the catch that holds the arms up was broken!! New rotary washing line was required to fix it.

Still on a 'Pear' Theme

The original collagraph plate was created using bits of wallpaper pasted to the mountboard base, with skim and repair being added to parts of the background surface afterwards followed by waterproof PVA to lighten areas. Whilst I liked the image it was not really what I wanted to achieve so this past week it was back to the drawing board and I remade a couple of my printing plates.

This is one of the new plates and now the pears have been formed by using masking tape on selected areas with a thin layer of skim and repair being added over the image.  Oiled wallpaper was then pressed into this whilst it was wet to create the texture. The background is waterproof PVA built up in layers to provide texture and light areas.  A small amount of carborudum was used to add contrast in the darker parts as well as cutting into the surface of the mountboard. Shame I had forgotten what colour oil based ink I used on the first plate.  I think it was Prussian Blue and Raw Sienna whilst I changed to Prussian Blue and Red Oxide on the second plate.

Mainly Prussian Blue

Next week I am going to try viscosity printing and could also look at the addition of chine collee to the surface.

All Things Pear Shaped

I recently made a card for a friend's 60th birthday and it featured lots of pears too .. don't think I had started the pear sketchbook on black paper at that point.

Pear Book Pages

Continuing to play in my Black Pear Book.  I found a scrap of a picture in a magazine and stuck it onto a page realising it had similarities to an existing page that I had collaged and drawn onto. The bottle was a piece of Deli Paper that had been Gelli printed. I added a bit of oil pastel on top of it to pick up soe highlights.

A combination of lots of bits and pieces and a little more work required before I will be happy with this.

The top half of this page has had shapes cut out of it to reveal aspects of the page behind it.

Team Rickshaw

Got up nice and early this morning to watch Team Rickshaw pass our house on the next leg of their journey. They left Great Malvern at 7.00 am and were setting a good pace, but they have some hard climbing to do today looking at their route. I had to miss their arrival last night in Malvern as it was the first Women on Wheels AGM.

Playing with Pears

This week I have been playing in a black A6 sketchbook with pear images. Using my small Gelli Plate, some tiny cut outs and a limited range of acrylic paint I managed to fill up quite a bit of my time.  Also got out my Neocolour I and II crayons to add a bit more colour. Loved the little pears on the lefthand page once I had enhanced them. I forget I can actually do things!

This print was a happy accident. It was a mixture of grey paint over the top of some white that had dried on the Gelli Plate. The ghostly image appeared because I did not press down hard enough when I printed onto the black paper. The pear cut outs I used were going to be a concertina that opened out in the book, but did not really work, so back to the drawing board on them.

From a pile of previously printed papers I found the orange pear which had been printed using an actual pear sliced in half. The bottom pear was created using an expanded sponge print block with white acrylic which was then crayoned over to add colour.

A bit of gold Gelli Plate printing on the corner and a collaged pear from a previous printing session, which probably had the use of a stencil to create the background pattern and a sticky back funky foam print block stuck to a piece of foam core board for the pear outline.

Spooky Ride

Women on Wheels organised a Steady Ride over 31 miles today which took in some unusual characters along the way. Pink appeared to be the predominant dress code too.

We started from Upton Snodbury and stopped off along the route at Bishampton for coffee and cake. There was the opportunity for a sprint for those who wanted to up their pace, we crossed a ford (by bridge) and took in the pumpkin man at Naunton Beauchamp. Weather stayed dry and reasonably warm so it was a great ride.