Life after Arts Week. The Sweet Pea Project.

Tuesday, 4th November.

A month has passed since the excitement of the Open Studios, and its time to show the progress of the sweet pea linocut that I was working on in the wagon. Taking an early print shows me how much I still need to cut out......

An early print not fully cut out can look quite dramatic and its tempting to leave it like this. I've painted some watercolour just to give me an idea of how the planned colours might look. After more cutting out I make another print -

How different it looks!  I love the effect - almost like a woodcut. I now have to plan and cut a new piece of lino that will print the plain areas of colour. To plan this I take a print on tracing paper, then make a collage of the shapes of colour. If I lay the tracing paper on top I can see how it might look - the tricky bit will be lining everything up....

The second piece of lino is cut and prints made using the two colours - tomorrow I  hope to print the first detailed linocut over the coloured ones- registering is going to be tricky....... I will be posting the result on my next blog-
Meanwhile on my walks across our land I am stunned by the changing colours of the leaves and the shapes of tree branches beginning to re-emerge. Wild apples hang down in the hedgerow alongside scarlet hips and haws and flamingo pink spindle berries - so much colour!

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