Coffee break

Break time...

One of my favourite times at the allotment is break time, feasting outdoors always heightens my enjoyment, plus if you have earned a break its great to feel smug.


Photos of coffee and tea dregs, reflections on ceramic and enamel.

These Talented Artists Turned Coffee Stains into Works of Art

Coffee And Tea Turned Into Beautiful Art By Giulia Bernardelli

Much of this stuff is coffee based but there is always time for tea...

 RUBY SILVIOUS

LOVELY MISS ELVIS

stained tablecloths

After making some 'mug rings' of my own I also played around with the negative, brushed a wash of coffee onto cartridge paper, let that dry and and then make water marks back into the coffee. A ceramic cup leaves a lot of water, you can blot this carefully with tissue or use a pipette (I have lots as I like drawing with them) or if you can find a paper cup that will leave less water behind as it absorbs some.

slimmer lines done with paper cup

While the water is still damp it makes the paper translucent in this next photo the sketchbook page is backlit. All good potential backgrounds or mark making ideas.

Below is a tray designed by InDetail Interiors

Rorschach test and Inkblots

Bright sunny days are bringing leaves out and those first bright green leaves are tantalising.

The hedge around the allotment is made up of beech, hawthorn and poplar.

In searching for the identity of the leaves I came across this great resource for identifying a great deal of our native flora & forna, free downloadable identity posters...

Discover the Wild

I really like the mixture of symmetry and almost symmetry and enjoy mixing paint to try and capture the vibrancy of the leaves.

As I am using cartridge paper I have made the fold first and smoothed it out, then applied paint on one side and re pressed the fold to transfer some of the ink to the opposite side of the folded paper.

I use this technique a fair bit, so it will reappear I'm sure, partly for my own reference I'm leaving this link here to the more sophisticated use of this simple method, Rorschach prints...

Rorschach

The vivid green evokes memories of a pice of work I saw several years ago in the V&A, London.

Breathing in the Beech Wood, Homeland, Dartmoor, Twenty-Four Days of Sunlight

Garry Fabian Miller is a pioneer of the contemporary camera-less photographic image. This work represents his return to nature after a period exploring abstractions in light and colour. The leaves came from several trees and were gathered over a 24-day period in spring. Each vertical row of nine leaves represents one day of collecting and printing. Their careful arrangement shows the gradual effect of chlorophyll entering the leaf to make it green, offering a comparison between this process and photography, both of which rely on the transforming power of light. More on his works in the link on his name in this paragraph.

And lastly for today as I gather together scattered thoughts, a short extract from Wildwood, while this extract is written about autumn it still resonates in spring... (p205)

Wildwood 

A Journey Through Trees

Roger Deakin

"It has taken no more than a fortnight for the entire mountain side to change colour...with the shortening of the days, the mountain is displaying its geology through the minerals in its leaves....The chameleon leaves are litmus to the chemical changes going on inside them. The tree senses a particular moment when the balance between day and night has altered..."

The paragraph details some of the chemistry going on in the leaves, water sustained chlorophyll makes the leaf look green by absorbing blue and red light from the sun and masking other pigments in the leaf with varying effectiveness. Fascinating to think about green tree leaves in more detail and that what we perceive is to some extent an optical illusion.

Eggs At Easter

A festival of mixed up myth and counter myth...
Hope every one had a pleasant Easter break, I was certainly spoiled for good weather and the allotment is basking in sunshine.

I am always fascinated by the history of our cultural festivals, this was a good looking blog post I found about the history of the easter festival form a pre Christian perspective.

Into the woods

But current thinking takes some of the romanticism out of these connections as there is little historical evidence according to this article in the Guardian, oh well!

Modern myth of the Easter Bunny

None of my own experiments today but I have been collecting seasonal ideas and will definitely be utilising some of these techniques in the future.

Like so many printing techniques, many processes take time for preparation and take time to execute, but some really interesting ideas here;

Ruby Silvious painted egg shells

Onion skin stain for egg shells

Another printmaker called Emily Harvey has detailed her own experiments with this idea using egg shell as a mark making tool for building up texture on plates or print blocks.

printing-from-eggshells method

 I am now starting to save my onion skins!

I have been actually gardening, with the odd tea break, so look forward to more print experiments!

Plate Wipe

Dawdling at my desk when I should be out planting seeds in the sunshine!

The black & white seed mix was purchased at the last print fair Pete and I went to at the Hat Works museum in Stockport where we live. A fabulous hat collection as Stockport used to be a great centre for the hatting industry. The museum hosts a variety of other events including this latest print fair.

Stockport Hat Works

Seed packets sold by illustrator Alice Smith. I love packaging and this artist's work is great, her website is worth a look too.

Alice Smith Illustrator

Thinking about orderly lines of seeds...(A very unrealistic daydream) I did a few experiments with the process I know as Plate Wipe (Great name!) 

I tend to work in black and white, as a screen printer if you do artwork in colour it only needs converting to black and white to make a screen stencil... so it has become my habit to think about colour later on...something I should try to not always do maybe?

I was channeling thoughts of Maxine Bristow, one of the artists who shaped my trajectory though art education...specifically an exhibition she featured in back in 1999, at the Crafts Council Gallery that used to be in Islington (Rumours of a new gallery are circulating but on hold in the current climate) I was trying to see which path to take on my Foundation course and this exhibition tilted me towards textiles!

Maxine Bristow c.1999

Plate Wipe...This process is messy! 

...so clear some space, get some kitchen roll handy and clear a path to a tap to wash your hands as they get covered in black ink!

Using block printing ink, which is all I seem to have at home, I inked up two old membership cards, squishing or 'treading' the ink to a nice consistency and then used a tin can lid as my plate, later using the cards themselves.

Once the plate is inked up you can 'wipe' marks and lines into it with anything you don't mind getting inky!

tread the ink between surfaces if you don't have a roller

Its good to dampen the paper and blot it dry, I did one damp so you can see the difference, quite effective blurriness on the damper paper.

Smooth or push back ruff edges where
possible with an old spoon
or file if you have one.

Ink up the plate with one of the cards - a bendy one is good

Wipe or draw into the ink with bits of card, cotton buds pencils or sticks.

This process is messy! Keep washing your hands!

...and the prints

"Growing Moon" Mandala

April's full moon is sometimes called the Growing moon, the start of spring in the northern hemisphere. It was at it's fullest around 3.30 am Wednesday, so I was out moon chasing Tuesday night and this evening, to get as much moonlight as I could. Both evenings were clear, some haziness on Tuesday for atmosphere, and on Wednesday I was surprised, as always by the size of the moon as it climbs over the horizon. It's so unexpectedly large and bright even when expecting it!

I was at the allotment for the last bit of sunshine, admired the sunset as I went over a flower bed and then wandered searching for the moon on the horizon, underestimating when it would rise compared to yesterday evening.

coffee in a spritz bottle

earring as a centrepiece

Mandala of dandelion, buttercup leaves and small pink flowers!

love the long shadows

Coffee spritzed over the leaves

design once dried

This is a stencil at its most basic, acting as a mask, providing a silhouette. Organic silhouettes and shadows are one of the things I return to often in my work. Inspired by one of my favourite books.

Victor I. Stoichita, Professor of the History of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.

The book provides a history of art using the shadow as a defining motif.

Pause, Reflect, Reset.