BA1b Fine Art - Reflective Journal & Project Research

This week was the screen print half of the workshop. I used similar words for my screen prints as I did for my wood cut, 'Hear No Evil, See No Evil, Speak No Evil.' I also used a Banksy image which used the same theme as the saying. The screen printing process was no different to when I did it before, as I had done screen printing before, so I knew all of the steps involved - creating a stencil, placing it on a prepared screen, washing the residual emulsion off to reveal the screened images, then allowing it to dry and mixing colours in the mean time, and then printing the images. For the colours I decided to use block colours, rather than mixing my own, as I had an idea of where I wanted to go with these images. I chose to use black and red, as I was inspired by the prints of Barbara Kruger, and she uses black, red and white. I used a dark grey colour as a replacement for the white as the image I was using was quite small, and the paper was a white/cream colour. The ...

After trying out the print and text combination, I decided to try overlapping images on the same page. I basically printed the same image on different parts of the page, while trying to keep parts of the image overlapped. It was quite difficult to do as I didn't have a lot of room on the press, so I had to squish the paper slightly in order to get the prints. I also accidentally printed one of the images upside down, but I liked the effect overall so I embraced the mistake.  Again, I decided to use dark blue for the centre image and then I decided to use a rose pink colour and an emerald green colour, I liked how they complimented each other, and could still be seen through the blue. Having done some research, this experiment is similar to the works of Carnovsky - an art/design duo. One of their works looks at the RGB colour scale and overlaps images to highlight these colours. I definitely want to explore this idea further after seeing these works. I think, rather than ...

I started off my experiments with exploring text and print. I had an idea to print over text, and started off with magazine pages and newspaper pages. These pages are quite different in material, one is thin and papery, the other is thin and glossy, so I was interested in seeing if the different qualities of the papers would effect the outcome of the print. I did 2 magazine text prints and 1 newspaper print. I want to do another newspaper print which is bigger than the one I've already done, and I might do one where I overlap the prints.  Colour wise, I decided to use a dark blue as I wanted the print to stand out, but I didn't want it to blend in too much with the already existing black text. Although, now that I think about it, I might go back and try out different colours, perhaps even try out a different wood cut design.  I really like the connotations made with the combination of the background and the print. How the statement -  'speak no evil' on media res...

For Skills 2 Print, we were introduced to wood cut printing. I was really excited to learn about a new way of printing, as I had never been able to do wood cut printing before. I also enjoy this type of printing as I enjoy the process of creating a plate, seeing it come together bit by bit, and being able to change and manipulate the print easily. The process of wood cut printing is fairly to similar to lino, but can be slightly more difficult in that it requires a little more effort to cut into wood, whereas lino is fairly softer and smoother. The tools we used were similar, if not the same kind of tools - V tool, U tool and a knife. It was a lot easier to cut into this wood than I thought, the wood we used was quite soft, making it easier to make marks. However I did feel like I didn't have complete control of the tool as I made certain cuts as it would cut over parts which I didn't want to indent. My plate came better than I thought however I did mess up one of the l...