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

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

Printing a Penguin Cat!

My new collagraph print Penguin Cat is hot off the press today!

Penguin Cat Collagraph Print

I couldn't resist putting my black and white cat Morpheus with a group of black and white penguins, he looks so happy but I don't think they are so sure of him!

Heres my collagraph printing plate before it is printed. Notice I always have to work backwards and dark to light!

Collagraph Print: Print created from a card plate made by adding glue, paint, enamel etc. This holds the ink in varying degrees and is then printed through the intaglio process.

Heres where it starts to get messy! Etching ink with a touch of extender medium is applied to the printing plate all over getting into every crevice of the plate.

The ink is then gradually wiped off and the image is starting to appear.

Final wipe with some tissue paper. The ink is retained in any areas that are textured and the smoother the area the ink is wiped off.

The collagraph printing plate ready to be printed on my little table top etching press. Slightly dampned paper is placed over the plate and then the blanket over this and then the whole lot is rolled through the press. The weight of the roller will force the ink onto the paper slightly embossing the paper.

Always the exciting bit as you never know if the print will have worked or not until you lift the paper!

The final print hot off the press!

Lots of prints waiting to dry.

Clare xx

Steampunk Penguin

  A little artwork project I have been working on after Christmas is dressing up animals in steampunk inspired clothes! This penguin has been in my head for a long time so it was great to find the time to finally get him out of there! 

Originally he was only going to have a hat but I couldn't resist adding a smart waistcoat and cravat.

Steampunk Penguin Acrylic Painting

 Of course I couldn't resist making him into a collagraph print (printmaking process using a card printing plate with various textures added) and he just had to have a nice coloured waistcoat and cravat. It can get quite complicated doing more than one colour in printmaking and one thing I'm not good at is registering printing plates which you have to do when printing each colour on a seperate printing plate, I just don't think I have the patience. I decided when I was designing this collagraph printing plate to keep in mind I that wanted to print all the colours in one go which if I was not careful could all end up a very muddy mess!

Printing plate

Heres the printing plate ready to print. The blue is just textured acrylic paint, if you look very closely there are some cogs embedded in the paint so these will print very subtly in the background.

 This is the first colour, a kind of blue black metallic colour which was applied all over the printing plate and then wiped off again to just leave the colour in the indentations/roughest part of the plate. (Apologies for the messy background, I always think you have must have had a very good printing session when you find you have to wipe ink off door handles, lightswitches and your face!)

 The next step I added an acetate stencil shape of the penguin to mask this out while I applied the blue background a la poupee (French for the doll), basically applying a different colour to the printing plate with a small pad of fabric rolled up tightly so that the ink stays on the surface of the plate and the black background ink still shows through.

The penguin stencil was then removed and another stencil applied which covers all the background and  only the waistcoat is then showing. I applied red ink a la poupee.

 

 This stencil was removed and another applied with only the cravat showing. Purple ink was applied.

Heres a close up of the finished printing plate all ready to go onto the press to be printed!

Steampunk Penguin Collagraph Print

 And the finished very dapper penguin resplendent in his red waistcoat and purple cravat!

Clare xx