Four Seasons: a collagraph series (Part Two - how they were made)

In an earlier post I wrote about how this series of collagraphs came about and I promised to write in more depth about how they were actually made, so here it is.

As with most of my prints, this one started off sketched out on the back of an A4 piece of paper from the scrap paper drawer. (This disorganised scruffiness is why people who ask to see my sketch books are often disappointed.) Actually I suppose it really started in my head, appearing there unbidden as these things often do, and the trick was to keep it there until I had a chance to draw it. I can't be sure but I have a lingering fear that a lot of my best ideas have vanished like mist burning off in the sun. I will never know.

Once drawn out I then transferred the image onto a piece of mountboard which I would use as my plate. I flipped the image so that the print would come out the same I way I had originally created it. You might think that for a scene like this that doesn't really matter, but it does to me....

From sketch to plate

Now it was time for the fun part, sticking and cutting and messing about with collage. Well maybe not so much of the messing about. It is fun, but there is rather more to it than making a simple collage. As well as the shapes and texture I also have to consider the way different surfaces will take up the ink. I have to think ahead to the practicalities of inking up the plate and also remember that those parts most prominent on the plate will recede on the print. As with all printmaking, everything has to be done in reverse, like living in Alice's Looking Glass world.

Once complete the plate needs to be varnished on both sides

Inking up was a slow job, carefully applying the ink to different areas and then wiping away to get the right amount of coverage for each section. Some parts needed to be left with a good coverage, some needed to be cleaned and polished almost to whiteness. Each season in this series of four prints required not only different colours but also its own inking and wiping order. I made swatches at the end of each initial printing session so I could replicate the colours for subsequent ones and I also made notes in my print 'recipe book'.

Applying ink and then wiping and burnishing it

And then it was time to print. A registration sheet laid on the printing press is always useful to centre the plate on your paper, but for this print it was absolutely vital. The plate is in two parts and these had to be placed in exactly the same relation to each other on every print.

The registration sheet (left) and 'Winter' ready to print (right)

Damp prints are taped to boards so that they dry flat - seen here 'Autumn' and 'Summer'

Collagraph plates are fragile and I knew I was asking a lot of this one to survive printing editions of four different prints. Sure enough, some over enthusiastic cleaning at the end of one printing session ended up with the tree trunk tearing. Aaagh! You might think I could simply tape a cocktail stick on the back to hold it together, but this would make enough of a ridge to make the plate unusable. Any repair has to be as flat as possible. I glued the torn edges together and then carefully applied a single piece of paper to the back before varnishing the area again. The join will show on prints but as the tree trunk was textured anyway I think I got away with it.

Emergency repairs

And finally the four seasons were complete. A framed set will be exhibited at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming from 15th - 30th October 2016 and unframed prints are now available in my shop.

Four Seasons: a collagraph series (Part One - the idea)

Since Easter I have been one of a small group drawn from York Printmakers who have jointly been acting as Artist in Residence at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming. This wonderful place, just a mile or so from my studio, is home to (as you would expect) an extensive collection of farming machinery and equipment through the ages, but also livestock (from bees and ducks to sheep and pigs), the magical Danelaw Viking Village (regularly inhabited by re-enactors or thronging with groups of school children), a small Roman Fort, a Tudor house, a couple of prehistoric round houses and, to round it all off, the Derwent Light Railway.

The Danelaw Viking Village

It is also, conveniently, in the same village as the splendid Hawthorn Printmakers who made my press and who very generously loaned us a smaller version to use during our time at the Museum.

Our base has been a small pod in the middle of the huge barn which houses the Four Seasons Gallery over two floors. With glass walls on either side we have become one of the exhibits as we work at our printmaking. Visitors sometimes venture in to speak to us and ask questions; more peer in curiously from the outside at the strange captive artists. (None have yet banged on the glass but it wouldn't have surprised me if someone did).

The pod has been equipped to recreate the
 natural habitat of the shy and elusive printmaker...

The exhibits in the gallery take the visitor through the farming year, with audio commentary that is triggered by movement sensors as people walk around from season to season. Working in the pod we hear this commentary over and over again. You might think this would drive us mad.... and I must confess I have heard all I want to hear about the development of the plough... but after a while it became reassuringly consistent and the repetition echoed the theme of the gallery: the unchanging and reliable cycle of the farming year, a pattern which has remained largely unaltered down the centuries.

I initially planned a collagraph print of a countryside scene in the colours of autumn and harvest. As I began making the plate, however, I wondered if I could use the same plate to produce an image for each season. The fixed shape and texture of the plate would represent the enduring landscape, while changes to colours would reflect the passage of time through the year.

Creating the collagraph plate

This was an ambitious idea; collagraph plates are fragile and this was asking a lot of one assemblage of card and glue (and indeed I did have a torn tree trunk disaster which needed surgery with pva glue, backing paper and varnish) but I think I pulled it off. (That's a printmaking pun there. I promise if you're a printmaker it's hilarious.)

details of 'Autumn' and 'Spring'

The finished prints will debut at our end-of-residency exhibition at the Museum starting on 15th October 2016. More information here.

Update: there is now a further blog post explaining and demonstrating in greater depth how these collagraph prints were created. You can find it here.

The making of Velvet Ears

Social media can open interesting doors and make unexpected connections. I created this print last year, based on a photo taken by one of my online pals (whom I have never met in real life) of a puppy belonging to friends of hers. A few tweets gave me the permission of both the photographer and the puppy's owners to turn the image into a collagraph monoprint, and as a thank you the first two prints from the edition went to the parties concerned.

Although each print in the edition of 15 is made from the same plate, the image is created by wiping and removing ink in a painterly way. The results will therefore be slightly (or even greatly) different each time, making each print a monoprint. This is easier to show than to explain so I have finally got around to making a video of the process.

After giving away the first two prints in the edition, I put another one in the Taster Exhibition for last year's York Open Studios, where I am pleased to say it was the first sale made. Others from the edition are now available in my shop.

A Flick of Hares

There are several collective nouns for hares, but I like 'flick' the most for the way it evokes the fleeting glimpse which is often all we get.

This post is about how one small 10 cm x 10 cm hare ended up saving lives almost by accident.

It started last autumn when I decided to make a small collagraph print of a perky little hare peeping at the world. Once I'd cut the plate it had to be varnished with several coats of shellac, so while I waited for that to dry I was at a loose end.

There was a small piece of scrap lino on my workbench, just a bit bigger than the collagraph plate. I cut this down to the same 10 cm x 10 cm size and sketched on the outline of another hare - similar to the collagraph but not the same, more a memory of the drawing I had done earlier. I then carved it out with my lino tools almost freehand, pretty much making it up as I went along.

I inked it up and printed a first proof - and I laughed out loud. Instead of the 'Curious Hare' I had planned (and I think achieved) for the collagraph, this chap looked slightly crazy. He was definitely a March Hare.

Collagraph 'Curious Hare' (left) and linocut 'March Hare' (right)

I produced prints from both the collagraph plate and the lino block, and in fact printed the lino version in several different colours. Both were a hit when they debuted at a Christmas fair in December 2014.

A couple of months later I was mulling on what I could do for Comic Relief's 2015 Red Nose Day. I thought of the Parable of the Talents; I could either just give £100 to Comic Relief, or I could spend that amount on materials, packaging, postage and PayPal fees and quadruple it before passing it to Comic Relief. The theme in 2015 was 'Make your face funny for money', so I looked at my hare.... and wondered what he'd look like with a red nose. The answer was he would look like this.....

'Mad March Hare'

Behold, my March Hare was now even more bonkers, and had become a Mad March Hare. I contacted Comic Relief to get the necessary approval and paperwork. (If your fundraising is connected to your business it has to be authorised, for obvious reasons). Fortunately they loved the idea and gave me full permission. I announced on social media that there would be an edition of 40 and that they would be £10 each. I printed only a few in advance as I really wasn't sure they would sell....

The entire edition sold out in under six days *screams* and thanks to the enthusiasm and generosity of the wonderful people who bought one (or two, or three) I was able to send a fantastic £400 to Comic Relief.

Packaging up and mailing the prints

And all because I had had nothing to do while I waited for some varnish to dry.


Footnote:
My Mad March Hares have of course all gone - never to be repeated (such is the nature of limited editions!). The original collagraph 'Curious Hare' and linocut 'March Hare', in various colours, can still be purchased on my website, as well as greetings cards with the Mad March Hare image.

Abbeys - creating a new series of collagraphs

Up to now my collagraphs have tended to be small and detailed, often relying less on the structure of the plate and more on the wiping of the ink. I had an urge to do something a bit bigger and looser, and so the idea of a series of prints of landmarks was born. The first two images which popped into my head were of two of my favourite places in North Yorkshire, which both happen to be ruined abbeys. Here are the finished prints of Whitby Abbey (English Heritage) and Fountains Abbey (National Trust).

Whitby Abbey and Fountains Abbey each 30 x 30 cm

And here's a little about how they are made. The first step is to work out the drawings, thinking all the time of how the layers will need to be built up on the plates and the order in which they will be inked up. Once the drawings are finished they have to be traced onto the pieces of mountboard I'm using as plates (remembering of course to reverse the images!).

Then comes the fun bit of building the plates both by cutting away some parts and by adding collage elements. I use different textures of paper, pieces of fabric and pva glue painted on in lines and smears. It's important to remember these are printmaking plates, not collages, so some parts might be counter-intuitive. For instance look at the middle window on the Fountains Abbey tower on the right; I want to 'see' the sky through this, but instead of cutting away a section of the tower which would then just fill with the ink I use for the stonework and be dark (like the small top window), I have stuck on a piece of plain paper which I will be able to wipe clean and then add a little sky colour at the end.

Once the plate is finished it is varnished with several layers of shellac and left for a couple of days to harden completely. Inking up is a long job and has to be carefully planned (you'll notice planning is a recurring theme in printmaking). There's no point adding ink to one area if it's going to be wiped away when you add another. The photo on the left shows the Whitby Abbey plate with the ink laid on the sky, background and pond. I wipe most of this down before adding the ink to the abbey itself, and then there is a lot of wiping, touching up and more wiping. It takes about an hour to reach the stage in the photo on the right, which is the plate ready for printing.

The really magic moment is when you pass a plate through the press and see for the first time what it looks like as a print. There is always an element of surprise - simply the fact the picture is a mirror image of the plate you have been working on for so long means it looks fresh and new.

Then it's time to clean the plate down, prepare another piece of paper and start inking up all over again.....   I'm planning to get editions of 15 of each print but collagraph plates are fragile things. Look what started to happen to the Fountains Abbey plate after just three prints.

Aaaagh! This will need careful repair and then more varnishing before I can carry on.

And meanwhile I'm thinking about what will be the next prints in this series. All I can tell you for sure is that they will be abbeys or churches. They might be all in Yorkshire.... or they might not. They might all be ruins... or perhaps not. We'll have to see where inspiration strikes. Do you have any suggestions?

Ammonite Giveaway Winner

Thank you so much for all your entries to the giveaway I posted here at the end of July. I was delighted to see so many right answers! The challenge was to watch a short video released by Saltaire Inspired to whet your appetite for September's Makers' Fair, spot me in it and tell me which word appeared on screen at the same time as I did. (As if that wasn't easy enough, I was actually wearing the same top in the video as I am wearing in my current profile pic.)

Here I am, and the word is 'creative'. Using the latest cutting edge competition technology (printing the correct entries on bits of paper and putting them in a bowl), the winner has been selected and...

The independent adjudicator checks everything is in order.

(drum roll)....

...it's Gail Falkingham.

Congratulations Gail, your Ammonite collagraph print is on its way to you!

For everyone else who entered, sorry you didn't win this time, but this series of prints is available online and will of course be at the Saltaire Festival Makers' Fair 12-13 September.

Can you see me?

I was delighted to hear I am one of the 45 artists and makers selected for the Saltaire Festival Makers' Fair in September. The icing on the cake was finding out that I'm featured in this rather fun little video released to publicise the event (using a pic which must have been taken of me at last year's show). Can you see me? If you can then you could win one of my new Ammonites prints. Watch the video - it's only 30 seconds - then see below for how to enter. (Hint - if we haven't met and you can't see what I look like from the little profile pic here, there's a bigger version on the 'About the Artist' page of my website.)

Once you've spotted me, simply email me with the subject line 'I see you' and tell me which word is on the screen at the same time as I am. A winner will be chosen at random from all correct entries after the closing date which is 10 August 2015.

• Only one entry per person please
• The winner will be emailed and asked for their name and postal address so the print can be sent to them. If no reply is received in three days another draw will be made.
• The winner's name will be published here on the blog
• All emails will be deleted after the winner has been drawn; your email address will not be saved and will be used only to contact you if you are a winner.
• The prize will be a print from my Ammonite collagraph monoprints series. (Three different examples are shown below).

Ammonite series mini prints -  each image size 10 x 10 cm

For more information about the Saltaire Festival and the Makers' Fair please visit their website. The Makers' Fair is on 12 and 13 September 2015 in Victoria Hall, Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

The Ammonite prints will be available at the Fair and are currently in my Etsy shop. If you're near York right now you can also see them in the 'Jurassic Coast' exhibition at Blossom Street Gallery until 19 August.

Good luck!

Robin Nest - printing a collagraph

One of the most common questions I get asked at shows is "How long does one of these take you?". The poor unsuspecting enquirer is probably expecting a simple two word answer starting with a number and ending with a unit of time, but I'm afraid instead they get an explanation of the many variables of printmaking. I try to stop talking before their eyes glaze over too much.

With some forms of printmaking, the time-consuming bit is carving and creating the plates from which the print is made, while the actual printing is a relatively quick whizz with an ink roller and a pass through a press. With others the plate might be fairly simple, but inking up for each individual print is a slow and painstaking job. The collagraph print I'm going to show you here is one of the latter. The plate was made from a piece of mountboard (or matboard if you're in the US); some parts were incised to remove the top layer while in other areas texture was created by sticking on elements including thread, paper shapes and lines of pva glue. Once finished the plate was sealed with several coats of shellac.


The first colour to be applied was a pale green blue for the twigs in the nest. This had to be pushed right down into the incised areas so I used a toothbrush to work it in. The ink was the thick and sticky consistency you would use for other intaglio methods (eg etching) so it would stay where it was put and not be easily wiped out again.


I didn't want much of this colour on the surface of the plate so I wiped the excess off with a piece of scrim and to make some of the marks even clearer I cleaned up around the edges with a cotton bud.

Then I added a green ink with a roller. Now I was working in a relief method so the ink just lay on the raised surfaces not in the indentations. The ink was loosened to a relief printing consistency for this using an extender. After inking, the outer area was softened and blurred by wiping with scrim, while the centre part was cleaned up with a rag to remove as much ink as possible

The middle of the plate was now inked up with a brown colour. This was another time that I needed the ink to be pushed right down into the nooks and crannies, so I used a poupée; meaning 'doll' in French, this is a thick soft stump made by screwing a piece of rag into a ball and then wrapping and taping or tying another piece round it.

Then I used another piece of clean rag to take the brown ink off the paper eggs in the centre and yet another to wipe some pale blue ink directly onto them. (Worn out shirts never get wasted here.)

Finally, after around half an hour of adding and wiping ink the plate was ready....

... to be passed through the etching press with a piece of dampened printmaking paper, and a print was pulled.

And then it was time to clean up the plate and do it all over again. After seven prints the fragile plate began to degrade and that was the end of the edition. Each print inevitably came out differently so the prints are numbered with the annotation 'VE' for 'variable edition'.

'Robin Nest' is available to purchase on my website