paintings prints and stuff

Still life, stage 2, moleskine folio sketchbook - playing with patterns and composition I've worked a bit more on this one but there is still more to be resolved.   It's done in a mix of the Lyra pencils that I won and the Polychromos that I had.  There is a lot of layering of different colours to get subtle transitions happening. details: and potential crops for the finished piece: I like the squarer format of the second crop.  What do you think? Now time for decisions, what to change, what to lose entirely, what to darken, where to draw back into it with my Jakar eraser to regain light lines,  whether to erase the area outside the crop lines and leave an edge showing if I decided to put it in a mat  .......  push, pull, edit and change :>) Photographing it in dull natural light has made the colours much truer and shows the rosiness of the coppry/rosy leaves and vase better than in the stage one photos .

Misty morning, snow, Aylestone Meadows. Linoprint plus coloured pencil and oil pastel on brown paper. Vivien Blackburn First an apology - Ainesse left a really interesting and informative comment about linoprinting - and I somehow lost it :>( Ainesse could you possibly leave one again? and I'd love to read about the caustic soda process - and yes I have tried intaglio lino but wasn't very good at it! I don't have access to a printing press at the moment. Then - these are 2 of the 10 experiments worked into with coloured pencils and touches of oil pastel. The first print is an attempt to catch that thin mist, that often goes with snow, that softens and lightens colour, turning the world into gentle pastels. Evening, getting dark, snow, Aylestone Meadows, linoprint plus coloured pencils and oil pastel on black paper, Vivien Blackburn This one is an attempt to catch that cold bright light from the snow as the light goes. Are you fed up with this tree yet? :>D

Further experiments with the lino plate. The graphic clean print is all very well but I do like painterly expressive marks. So these are done inking up the lino with oil paint and a brush. This means that the colours can be more varied and the brush marks incorporated into the finished piece. Neither of these are finished. They need a little more work to pull them around but I can see where I can take them. On the one below, on black paper, I roughly painted a background and then printed wet in wet oil paint. Again, it needs more work. These were photographed with flash so the colours aren't quite true, they are a lot better IRL. I'll take some daylight pictures as they develop.