Making digital art

What a week of learning! Very interesting class today with Paul learning to use digital tools to alter and manipulate images.

With this image I making a custom 'brush' and using it to wallpaper a file. I made some alterations and adjustments to colour and 'plastic wrapped' it. Then I added a couple of layers, uploaded a picture, coloured, drew (yahooey Bamboo tablet!) and generally had a nice little 'play'.

Intaglio Printing with Bernie Part 1

 Workshop today was learning about Intaglio printing with Bernie Slater.

correct pronunciation please!

definitions of types of intaglio processes (i before e except after c?)

Bernie invited us to look at his etchings

Process for preparing a copper plate for intaglio printing:


1. Clean the copper plate with Brasso to remove surface grease and grit which might get in the way of the etching process

2. Cover one side of the copper plate with plastic contact paper; if you only polished one side of the copper, put the contact on the non-polished side.

3. Write your name on the contact in permanent marker.

4. Paint the polished, non-contact covered surface of the copper plate with a thin, smooth layer of bitumen paint. The bitumen is thinned with turps. Avoid obvious streaks or lumps in your layer of bitumen paint. Leave the bitumen painted plate to dry. This takes an hour or so. It is difficult to get a clean line when the bitumen is tacky, so be patient!

5. Draw into the bitumen layer with a fine pointed metal tool. The copper itself isn't etched with the tool, it only needs to remove the bitumen.

Bernie showed us a prepared plate that he had started etching into

Graham etching his prepared copper plate

My prepared plate, drawing and fine pointed etching tool

Painting and impasto with John Forrester Clack

Great Thursday painting class with John Forrester Clack. John talked to us about paints, grounds, supports (canvas, board) and his work.

Recently John has been working with heavy impasto medium, which is applied to a board, then paint is applied onto this when the impasto is dry. John's particular technique for applying the impasto medium to the board wasn't suitable for our setting, but we enjoyed using the impasto to 'draw' with.  John has a fascinating range of brushes, I really loved the badger hair brush. It was beautifully made.

This is the first time I have made a thickly textured painting. Also we didn't do any preparatory drawing, just got on with moving the medium around and exploring it's qualities. Thick impasto takes a while to dry and, it being a cold day, we needed to use a hair dryer to get it dry enough to apply the paint to.

We chose two colours and worked them carefully into the impasto. The high quality of John's paints meant that we used very little and the colours were brilliant.

Green face

There was a spare board when I had finished my first painting so I got a tiny bit more paint and 'drew' into it, great fun. I nearly feel like buying some good quality oil paints.

We found out that our paints don't have a lot of pigment in them, bummer! 

Making an artefact..

Following last week's lesson on making pressed clay molds I bought some clay and had a go at making one at home.

I have been reading Robert Graves' 'Greek Myths' and am intrigued by the messages from the past which enable us to piece together the myths, legends and facts (we know there were lions in ancient Greece because of the ones painted on kraters and other clay pots) of previous peoples. The paintings on ancient pottery are a considerable source of this information, so I decided to make a sort of 'rosetta stone' of my own.

What would someone from the future make of this?

press the selected items into the clay

  

                                    

                         close up of the mysterious message ;-)

the pour.....tension mounts, how will it turn out????

Leave the plaster to harden for about an hour, peel away the clay.

I trimmed the edges with a stanley knife, as had been demonstrated by Paul, and
Ta da!! The 'Delves Stone'

This piece was inspired by my interest in antiquity and the objects which are left behind for future generations to 'read' and interpret.

It is not difficult to see the influence of these images in my plaster cast above.