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

Rhinoceros and Calf

This is a drawing I did recently of a rhino with a young calf. 

It's an appropriately large one at A0, or 1189 x 841 mm. These photos don't really show the scale. I took loads of process pictures, but I think I have misplaced them!

I used india ink on Saunders Waterford watercolour paper. 

It was commissioned as a gift.

UPDATE

I found a couple of shots of the work in progress, so I thought I would add them in here...

Ride or Die

Here's a piece that I did recently. It was commissioned as a birthday gift for one of a trio of friends. The brief was that it had to include a tricycle (as a symbol of their three-way friendship) and the words "Ride or die".

I thoroughly enjoyed aggressively inking out the letters but decided that a Lisa Frank rainbow gradient would be perfect to lighten the tone. It looks like Summer holiday mischief to me.

Fresh ink

The trike

Printout

Rainbow typography

Forever & Ever

A while ago I did a one day screen printing workshop at Peckham Print Studio. It's the first time I had ever touched a screen or a squeegee or anything, and I came away with a two colour print edition of 10! Not bad. I'd highly recommend the workshop to anyone interested in screen printing and Hugh and Nathan are very helpful.

The piece is two stylised snakes, intertwined in an infinite Celtic Knot. A snake eating its own tail has long been a symbol of love without end, and these two have clearly decided to stick together!

I have listed the print in my Etsy shop if you are interested in picking up a hand printed piece for your wall. There are 6 looking for homes. Full details are in the listing.

Number 1 

Print detail

Screens at the ready!

Freshly printed stack

Blue snake detail

Orange snake detail

We Roam Your Streets at Night

You may have guessed that I love animals, and that I live in London. There aren't that many wild animals living in London, but I still love the sight of every single one of them. A lot of people consider them vermin, but rats, mice, foxes, pigeons, crows, are all magic for my eyeballs. 

There are quite a lot of foxes around Peckham, where I live, and I always thrill at a late night sighting when the streets are dark and quiet. That's what inspired me to make this print - called 'We Roam Your Streets at Night'. 

We Roam Your Streets at Night, A3 giclée print on Hahnemuhle german etching

Foxy

Victorian terrace

Wet tarmac typography

And now for the technical bit..
I created the whole print in Photoshop, working over a sketchbook page that I had scanned in. I like working with layers and playing on the interaction between them, so I decided to limit the colour palette by working on 3 layers: one cyan, one magenta and one yellow. I set the layer blending modes to 'multiply' so that the colours would mix where they are overlaid.

I drew into the layers using my trusty Wacom tablet. Here's a step-by-step GIF...

We Roam Your Streets at Night - Step by step GIF

So the colours I had to work with are cyan, magenta and yellow. Along with... 

Cyan and magenta making dark blue;

Magenta and yellow making orange;

Yellow and cyan making green;
No colours means you see the white page;

And if all three colours are present they make a dark colour, almost black.

I have separated each layer out to try and demonstrate, below...

The cyan layer

The magenta layer

The yellow layer

These prints are being printed by The Print Space right now, and I will post again when they arrive and I have listed them in my Etsy shop. 

18/03/2014 UPDATE

I have listed these prints on Etsy now! Check it out here: www.etsy.com/uk/listing/182980029/a3-print-we-roam-your-streets-at-night

Many thanks!

Watercolour Flamingo

I was recently commissioned to paint a flamingo on the same large scale as this African Grey parrot that I painted 2 years back. 

The first thing I did was grab the opportunity to go to London Zoo and see some flamingos in flesh and feather. They are seriously weird creatures - all pink and showy with spindly toothpick legs, unfeasible necks and big banana beaks. It was really helpful to spend an afternoon watching them walk about, feed, preen. They have a very surreal grace and beauty, and are such a joy to draw!

This piece is in fact 1.5 x 2 metres, watercolour on paper. Trying to manoeuvre a sheet that large is a heck of a challenge especially when it's just come off the roll. I used Dr Ph Martin's liquid watercolours, which are really concentrated pigments. They are light-fast and because they're liquid it's easy to mix large enough quantities to cover this size. The paper is Saunders Waterford watercolour paper from St Cuthberts Mill in 300gsm rough.

For a bit of size-scale-comparison-context, here I am sitting next to the beast.

And finally, after flying all the way from London to Cape Town, here he is framed and in his new home!