In the studio this morning… enjoying a printmaking session with acrylics and rice paper – I discovered one thing leading to another.

What led to the printmaking was a household project, some new planters for the garden. We cut a rain barrel in half, (to be used as a planter) then spray painted it so it would blend into the foliage and be more interesting. I created the stencils I used for printmaking for spraying the barrels. (If you look closely you can also see some interesting two-tone green patterns behind the white palms. I placed leaves and branches on the barrel and sprayed around them. The effect looks great close-up, but just didn’t have enough “pop” from a distance.)

So… now I had a nice new stencil pattern tempting me to do some printing.

1 I mixed up some green with my brayer, using phthalo blue and cadmium yellow. Nice bright green resulted, and using the brayer to blend kept the blending loose.  2. Then I brayered the color on the plate.

3. The first pulls I made off the plate were just for background color. No stencil yet. I made several sheets like this, each with a little different appearance of the green.

Stencil time.

4. I had cut this stencil out of a manila file folder. That’s thick enough to hold up for multiple uses and thin enough to lay down flat. With some darker green already on the plate, I pressed down the stencil.  5. One of  the sheets I had already printed with some background light-bright green is ready to press into the stencil. 6 Here I’ve printed from the stencil . I have a green palm on a lighter green background.

Look at the wonderful image that remained on the plate. That’s the ghost. In any kind of printmaking that uses a plate – either manual hand-printed as I’m doing, or when working with a press – after the image is printed, a ghost image remains on the plate. This is where one thing leads to another. The prints from these ghosts create some of the most interesting layers.

7 This is one of the sheets that already had two plate passes: one for the background, and another for the palm pattern. Now I’m going to print the ghost that was left on the plate onto this sheet.

Working with multiple plate passes for most of the sheets, I created a stack of paper that I think will create some interesting collage elements. (See how the theme keeps going. The printing isn’t the end. Collage next. One thing leads to another.)

This is a close-up of one of the sheets that I thought resulted in some great layers and textures.

As I was working through this printing session, I was reminded of a collaged work I created several years ago printing from actual palm fronds. It’s one of my favorites. I love the incredible detail of the palms that’s picked up by the hand printmaking methods.

This is a detail of one panel. The whole work is a triptych: three framed pieces each 24” x 24”. If you’d like to see more, it’s on my website HERE.

Thank you for reading.

I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi

bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

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