I found a book in the library called 'Wicked Plants' and it will be really helpful to me to learn about dangerous plants and plants that are used in poisons. I have done a few sketches of plants so far but need to produce a body of imagery around this theme so I have a lot to choose from when I am preparing my final designs for my prints.
I wanted to see whether I could combine mono printing and linocut printing to create a more interesting outcome. This needs testing out so I cut out a small lino, around A6 size, I am concerned that this might be too small for a test because the level of detail in this linocut would differ greatly to a larger one.
These are my firsts prints which I did with black block printing ink by just pressing down on them. I also did a couple with green acrylic but the quality was very poor. I used coloured pencil crayons over the black prints to see where I could apply ink through mono printing and I used the acrylic prints to see how I could apply a dark colour over light ink.
I think the mono print idea could work really well, I like how the colour looks with the black and how certain aspects are highlighted and accentuated with the colour. I particularly think the unintentional textures which are left on the paper after a mono print will look really nice and give the flat quality of a linocut a bit more life and depth.
These are a few of the lino prints I did in the print room with the proper inks and press. I have not considered colour properly for this project yet but I am thinking of working with green so I chose to work with this colour even though on reflection, this is probably not the kind of green I would use for my finals because the pale ones look too calming.
These are the results after mono printing onto of my lino prints.
I think the most successful prints are the ones with the dark blue over the mid-tone green, especially the one on the first page of this publication, although they still don't have the impact I was hoping for. I think applying the dark blue to the very pale green drowns it out and the contrast is too high for the image to be easy to look at. I noticed that working on tracing paper (page 6) allowed me to add in loads more detail with less smudges appearing on the paper. This made me think about when a design like this is scaled up and the level of detail would be higher and more impressive to look at.
Applying a light colour ink over a dark lino print didn't work out very well. The print on page number 7 smudged a lot and it looks like smoke rising from the objects.
Page 10 onwards - these are mono prints I did and then printed my lino over the top of them, the opposite of the previous process. The lino has a lot higher impact so a lot of the mono printed parts were drowned out by it. An example of where this process has worked well is on the final page where I did a mono print of the bottle and then placed a stencil over this part when I lino printed so that it didn't get covered up with another layer of ink. I think this is something that could work but I would need to plan my linocut out with the intention of doing this, I wouldn't have to used a stencil, I could just cut the entire shape out of the lino so it didn't print.
I noticed that the parts of the image with the strongest contrast attract the most attention so I would have to consider what colours to use and where to apply them to ensure the strongest contrasted areas are the ones that I want people to pay attention to.
I am not feeling very confident about this process because there are only a few tests out of all of these which I think might have potential but none of them whatsoever have made me think that this is a really good idea and made me want to commit to this process.
Next steps:
- Decide on what scale I want to do my prints and print a small section (to scale) to get a proper idea of the level of detail I can include.
- I need to check with the brief / tutors to see if all my prints would need to be identical if I continue with this process or whether I can mono print over each lino individually to make them all a little bit different but still have the same design.
- Draw more plants from reference so I have more material to work with.
- Establish a clear concept for each of my prints and start roughing.
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