New Work

Had quite a productive couple of days. With the first of this years art fairs coming up at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield in two weeks time I need to get some new work done.

First of all I've got a couple of colours down on a new Linocut.

 Block cut and inked for the first colour. There has been quite a bit of carving done already as this print will have a lot of white areas in it.

 First colour printed.

 After a bit of cutting, block inked for the second colour

I could have printed this colour first and then printed the grey. But the next colour is going to be a pale green and that will look much more vibrant on top of the yellow than it would on the grey. Well that's the theory anyway. It should start to make more sense after the next two colours are printed.

After dithering around trying to decide if the mezzotint that I have been scratching and scraping at for the last couple of months was finished. I finally made the decision and printed the edition. I'm still feeling my way around doing mezzotints, this is only my third attempt at one and it's taken a bit of experimenting to get the pressure right on the press and to wipe the plate properly. There is a very fine line between getting it right and wiping too ink much from the plate. But after 7 hours of,  it has to be said, pretty monotonous inking, wiping and printing I now have an edition of 20 prints laid out and drying off nicely.

Time for a beer!