I’m still feeling very enthusiastic about tearing up bits of paper and gluing them to stuff. I dug a sketch of some redbud leaves out of my sketchbook and transferred it to a gel print I made recently. When I first finished collaging the leaves and drawing the veins in, it looked like this:
After that, it went through a very awkward stage during which I seriously regretted doing anything further to it. I couldn’t bring myself to actually take a photo of it at that point, but it had lost a lot of the contrast between the leaves and background and was looking pretty bland and uninteresting. Last night I worked on it some more and am happier with it now, though I’m still unconvinced that it’s better than the unfinished version.
Sometime last week or so, I was trying to find good use for a pile of deli paper that I’d run through my (inkjet) printer. I’ve never managed to use these without badly smearing the ink on them, though I’ve read of other people using injet prints successfully. But I wanted to do something with them, so I made some gel prints with a couple of pages that had printed text from an old, out-of-copyright manual full of botanical names that I found on archive.org.
It didn’t work as well as I’d hoped, but it did help to some degree. I used as little medium on top as I could get away with to keep the smudging to a minimum. I kind of felt at the time like I’d phoned this one in — I couldn’t think of anything else to do with it at the end, so I just sort of flung some ink at the page — but it’s grown on me.
Before I go: I really enjoyed presentation by Curlee Raven Holton of the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College.
