Peckham Print Studio Field Trip

Climbing Trees at the Horniman Museum

Continuing my intermittent flirtation with screen printing, I joined Peckham Print Studio's Field Trip to the Horniman Museum & Gardens towards the end of last year. My resulting two colour screen print is above.

The Horniman is a fantastic local museum that was opened in 1901 by a Victorian collector and, in the spirit of the age, it's crammed full of fascinating and exotic stuff; including natural history, African and musical instrument collections.

The Horniman Museum

The trip was led by Tom Murphy, an artist and fastidious screen printer, and consisted of one day of drawing at the museum and another day of printing at the studio. On day one we started out in the Natural History gallery, moved on to the African gallery, then the Music gallery and ended with a bit of sketching outside. Below are some of my sketches. They are all done with india ink in a Pentel Aquash brush pen on tracing paper.

Baboon and skeleton

Spectacled Caiman

Tree climbing mammals

Two tree shrews

Gold figure of an African hunting dog

Various figures and skulls

A case of horn instruments

  

Tom having a sketch in the gardens

On day two the group worked on producing a 2 colour A4 print each, back at the print studio. We were very thoroughly guided through the whole process by Tom, and as I only vaguely remembered what to do it was very helpful. We chose a composition from what was produced the day before and then exposed the tracing paper drawings directly onto a screen.

Exposing my drawings onto a screen

My exposed screen

A fellow field tripper preparing her print

Just the black layer

I chose the case of tree climbers and the horn assemblage to overlay in black and gold. It looks like an almost claustrophobic layering of slightly random stuff that - I think - represents the museum quite well. I'd highly recommend a visit and, if you're interested in joining a Field Trip, keep an eye on Peckham Print Studio's Twitter account.

My final print with black and gold layers

The view from the Horniman Gardens