By Barbara Seery
Isn’t it great to be back in action after the summer break? Colleen gave a wonderful workshop on Saturday, 13th September for those interested in creating printing blocks and printing onto paper and fabric.
We spent an enjoyable morning drawing a motif and learning to see the positive and negative elements in the image. We then traced the motif and transferred it onto two small foam board pieces, one for the positive section of the motif and one for the negative. After some intricate work with a blade, cutting mat and double sided tape we all had two printing blocks with which to play.
By numbering each corner of the printing blocks (1,2,3,4) we could then set about experimenting with the shapes and patterns created by turning the printing block in alternative directions and noting those patterns at the top of each piece of work for future reference.
Print with negative and positive blocks onto pages of an old cookery book
We created a paint pad by putting a piece of wet felt into a flat plastic food tray and putting acrylic paint onto it. We spent a very pleasant afternoon printing patterns onto brown paper, old book pages, the back of old envelopes and then progressed to printing onto plain and pre-dyed fabric pieces, bondaweb, muslin and scrim.
We went home with lots of base pieces with which to layer and work by machine and hand stitch into future works of art!
Print with negative and positive blocks onto Bondaweb and ironed onto white cotton
Print block onto Bondaweb and ironed onto cotton
Print with negative and positive blocks and overlaid with bird stencil
Print with negative and positive blocks separately (row 1 & 2) then overlaid on bottom row
