PVA glue around the edge of a jar lid will print a nice circle on a piece of paper. Add more glue for more visible parts of the moon. Sprinkle glitter before the circle dries. Add a few paint and/or crayon clouds to the sky.
Blue Monday
Tag: monoprint
Nineteen Eighty Four
I’ve realised it’s now forty years since my art college graduation. There’s a certificate somewhere on the bookshelf that says I have a degree in Fine Art. The certificate doesn’t look like a genuine document so it fits well with my dissertation about art forgery.
“But what is Fine Art?” people ask. No idea, but it’s a term used in frilly lettering outside galleries showing the kind of art that would have been sneered at by any of our tutors. In 1984, anything looking like a craft was discouraged. Printmaking was a grey area, but it was tolerated.
For the first few years after graduation I was a member of some printmaking studios. There were group exhibitions and teaching sessions. Then there were the ‘back to work’ schemes. These assumed that all work took place in an office, so there were basic maths and literacy classes. Meanwhile, I missed deadlines for creative opportunities which required proof of concept and skills. Helpful jobcentre ladies would ring prospective employers, saying “She’s got a degree in graphic design!”. When I pointed at my CV (again), they’d say “isn’t that the same thing?”.
During the last four decades I’ve collected a lot of rejection letters. Some of them were quite expensive.
Forgotten messages
I found a few copies of this message in a bottle this morning. It was the first block I cut with my little T.N.Lawrence cutter (my hands will never be big enough for a professional adult version). All of the prints are patchy in different ways, maybe I’ll make another batch of them someday.
Test prints
A couple of printing sessions that were more chaotic than usual. Missing pliers meant that I couldn’t get the lid off a blue ink tube. Some leftover black from the previous day seemed a good option. Later, I found another foil-wrapped leftover, a mixture of blue and white.
If Jack Frost has trapped the sun in a block of ice, then that would be the only light source. My first plan was to have a cool grey bluish sky with a bright yellow sun shining through the ice. Now I like the black background better. It still needs some tweaking…
Monoprint
berry daines 