Daily art

As I posted earlier, I am trying to do a doodle a day.  And a lino cut a day.  The latter has proven more problematic as I only had so much lino (and soft cut) available.  One of these days I am going to have to go out and buy some more.  I have been trying to limit myself to what I already had but now I am running out, despite a friend giving me what she had left over from her textile course.  She says she is not going to do more lino cutting, it wasn't her thing.
As the doodling is small, I have been able to keep to my resolution of one a day (well, I did miss two days but allowed myself do to extra on the third day). It is still unusually hot here in Melbourne and so the doodling has been more doable than some of the other things I could be doing. However, the sweaty hand can be a problem, it smears the ink if I am not careful. Very annoying.

I have been reading about Art Nouveau (randomly chosen link here, one of many) and Charles Rennie Mackintosh and I think I can see some of that creeping into my designs.

I have tried out some of my lino cuts after I realised I was happily cutting away but not printing them.  I have only done them in a book so far, not on fabric.  Will get around to that one day, if I can think of how to use these designs.  At least my cutting is improving, not to the point where I can put in the same detail as in the doodling but I think that is just the medium and I will never achieve that.

 I didn't do any of the cutting with repeat patterns in mind but it seemed such a waste to get the fabric paint out and just do one print, so I did some multiple prints for a few of them.

New Year Resolutions

After purposely not making any new year's resolutions, apart from the one not to make any resolutions, I have made a few tentative resolutions recently.  So there you go, I have broken my only resolution already.  ( I just reread this paragraph and I have used the word resolution 4!!!! times - not counting the heading either.)

Maybe it is because it is the new Year of the Snake that I am even thinking of starting something like this.
Anyway, I have all these ideas rushing around in my head - very exciting but also a bit daunting as I know I will not follow up on most of them.
Still ... I might follow up on some. Better too many ideas than none at all. I hope.

So ...
One of the ladies in my new playday group (if I can call it that) has a book that is also designed to be worked through to develop your creative and artistic skills (Finding Your Own Visual Language by Jane Dunnewold).  One of them appealed to me. It was to make a stamp every day for 30 days (maybe I could do the 40 days of Lent?? I did start on Ash Wednesday).  I probably liked this idea because I thought I could incorporate some of my recent interests all in one hit:

• black line drawing 
• doodling
• lino cutting
• stamping your own fabric.

So far I have drawn some doodle/zentangle designs and cut out some small stamps (only 2, I have only done 2 days).

I thought I would try to two different mediums I have and see how they go - when I get around to printing them.

I will try to do one stamp a day and at least one doodle.

Yes, I know there are three, I got carried away the first day.

However, I am finding that the doodling is appealing to me and I have done several small ones as I was sitting and having a cup of tea. 

Doodling while having a cup of tea.

It will be interesting to see if I last more than a week - I never seem to get past exercise two in these books and, yes, it is exercise two.

What a difference good equipment makes.

They say a poor workman blames his tools.  I'm not sure that having good tools makes you a better worker (or designer) but it sure makes the work easier.
I decided to splurge and buy a couple of better quality lino cutting tools.  I got u-shaped tools as the person selling them said they were easier to use than the others I was looking at. As I am such a beginner at this technique, I decided to take his advice.
They are certainly much easier to use, and will do much finer work, than the cheaper tools I already had.  They were the sort used in schools, good enough to do the job but not high quality.  What public school can afford the best quality in class sets?  I only got two as I am not sure where I am going with this technique and how much fabric I want to produce.

I went back to the Uluru tile and cut away the sky part.  I still need to cut more away but thought I would do it in stages.  It is easy enough to cut away but impossible to put bits back.

Then I started working on an image I copied from a photo I took in France last year.  It is perfect for practising my texture mark making.  So far I haven't done all the mark making. I thought that, once again, I would print it in stages, just to see the differences. More work to be done on this.

Then I tried a small tile.  I took a photo of gum blossom and traced that.  I need to cut more of the background out - again.  I suppose I will get a better feel for how much to cut off when I get more experienced.

Lesson Two of the LIno Cutting

I have finally got around to starting lesson two.  It is only about 2 weeks late but better late than never.
We were asked to work on a design that has balance and movement and the example we were given had a tree, so I used a picture from our trip to Uluru.

It hasn't turned out quite how I envisaged it but I won't change much yet, I will give myself time to think about it.  I am not used to lino cutting and printing and how the cut away parts can be in the image.  It also took a lot of cutting, so I don't want to do much more to it just yet.

While I have been researching ideas for other work, I came across some information about fossils that have opalised.  So I cut out a design and then used mixed colours on the lino to try to get the effect.
I wasn't sure whether to cut this out for the negative or positive image but I am quite happy with how it has turned out and this one has much less cutting and was much faster to do!

As I said, the printing takes little time at all - the work is in the designing and cutting.  Of course, I have only printed small samples, not large amounts of fabric.  Now all I need to do is think of what I might use the fabric samples for - if I don't just put them in my visual diary. The samples above are approximately 20cm x 16cm.

Lino cutting part 2

In part two of our lesson, we had to design a shape to experiment with positive and negative - something I always have a bit of trouble with.  It was suggested we use a maple leaf but I decided to use a vine leaf as there was one growing at the back door.
I scanned it and played around with it in Photoshop, trying to get clear edges and veins.  One of them looks a lot like a mask!

When I printed it and tried to cut it out, to trace, I realised that my lino cutting skills are not up to the task.
Then I remembered the drawing I had done earlier in the year and thought that I could use something like that.

Once again, my cutting skills are not up to it.  Hence the simple leaf shape.

I realised that part of the instructions had shown the leaf print over the texture print and I might get a similar sort of image to the original drawings.

The darker background shows the texture better.

Printing with lino cut designs

I saw that Dijane Cevaal was offering an online lino cutting course and decided that I would like to have a go at that.  I saw other students who did first year drawing playing around with all sorts of ways to make marks and was jealous that when I had done first year drawing we hadn't done that - that is one of the problems with part-time study, you get to see the course changes and wish you could do some subjects repeatedly.
So when I saw this offered I decided to take it on - not that I don't have plenty of other things to be working on but you must seize the day, as they say.
I have been feeling a bit stressed by it as we get our lesson every 2 weeks and I have had mine for a week and a half now - thank goodness for this (unofficial) long weekend.

So here are the results of our first lesson.

Texture sampler, the lino cut.

I tried to make orange but it came out a bit too red, with streaks.  Of course that was a design feature, not a mistake!