Tuesday 24 March 2015

Wearable Artworks

I love the idea of getting my artwork out to people who wouldn't normally buy or be able to afford to buy original artwork. When I came to work on a new Steampunk costume I decided that I wanted to make some fabric wrist cuffs to wear which featured some of my wearable artwork so I thought I'd have a go at printing some myself!

I couldn't resist carving an octopus tentacle for a linocutprint. Its a very simple image but looks great printed onto fabric. I used the softcut lino so that I could cut out the shape of the tentacle and therefore didn't have to carve out the unwanted background. Heres me getting messy inking up the lino printing plate or tentacle!


 Lots of tentacles printed onto scraps of fabric, once I get printing I can't stop!
Once the ink was dry dry I started making! This is the one I made for myself with a ruffle at the wrist which matches my new green elf leaf skirt!


 Once I got started making of course I had to make a few more!

Purple Octopus Tentacle Cuff

 And a few more! These are available in my Folksy shop.
Steampunk Tentacle Fabric Cuffs
  I've even managed to make use of my huge tin of buttons too!
 With a little bit of left over printing ink I even printed a tentacle tote bag too!
Tentacle Tote Bag

I was enjoying making them so much I thought I'd try a few different coloured printing inks and also some of my cog linoprinting plates!

Steampunk Cogs Fabric Cuff


Green Steampunk Cog Fabric Cuff

I'm having great fun making them so should be making some more very soon!

Clare xx

Sunday 1 March 2015

Purple Animal Prints

I love the colour purple and find myself using it a lot in most of my artwork! When I first started doing my animal collagraph prints I just couldn't resist trying them in purple ink and can't believe how good they look!

Collagraph Print - created from a card plate made by adding glue, paint, enamel, collaged elements etc. This creates textures which hold the ink in varying degrees and is then printed through the intaglio process. This is a great technique for my animal prints as I can cut the card into the animal shapes!

The very first was my hippo collagraph print he just had to be tried in purple and was so popular the edition sold out completely with most of them going to America!

Purple Hippo Collagraph Print
Purple Hippo Collagraph Print
I also did a Purple Elephant, Purple Rhino, Purple Penguin, Purple Tiger and Purple Cat and had to restock my purple printing ink quite a few times!

Recently I have been doing some more animal collagraph prints and couldn't resist doing a few purple ones!

Here's me getting very messy printing a Purple Meerkat.

 
And a Purple Pony hot off the printing press!
 
 
 A few of my toys got to star in the photos too!
Purple Lemur Collagraph Print
 
Purple Meerkat Collagraph Print
 
Purple Pony Collagraph Print
Looking forward to working on a few more purple animals soon!

Clare xx