Hello,
It's been a while (again) since I've written a post but better late than never!
I've been busy over the past few weeks creating new work and it's been an exciting and productive time. I came back from a short Christmas break full of energy and enthusiasm, ready to flesh out some ideas that had been brewing for a while.
For the purpose of this post I'm going to focus on three recent images I made. My plan was to make a small group of images with a similar subject matter and colour palette. I don't often make sets of work so I thought this would be a good challenge for me and I'm really happy with how they turned out.
The starting point for each image was a linocut bird. I love the textures you can achieve with linocut whilst still achieving an all over pretty even covering of colour. I am a basic linocutter I guess but as there's no real right or wrong way for my purposes (so I've told myself), I feel that's ok. I wanted each bird to be surrounded by a strange plant land, and I really enjoy creating fantasy plants and landscapes that are a little strange and perhaps unsettling. I always like to imagine living in those strange worlds and whether I'd feel entirely comfortable! I wanted the images to be retro-mid century tinged, and I hope my chosen colour palette reflects this. Once the linocut print was down, I worked into the landscape building it up with coloured pencil, acrylic and gouache. I get totally absorbed in creating, working up the layers, making the textures, it's a real joy. I've started using gouache after leaving it for a long time (lots of dried tubes that have now been re-discovered and bought back to life, not always successfully)! I find for larger areas it scans better that watercolour for me (although that may be my bad scanning technique, who knows, if anyone has any tips I'm all ears)! I took inspiration from sketches I made from one of my many visits to the V&A Museum in London (love it so), and of course natures delights, birds, are always a lovely subject. The V&A has a huge amount of beautiful and sometimes strange objects and artwork. I especially love the medieval period rooms and get lost in time when I'm there.
Well, I think I've rabbled on for long enough. I hope you've enjoyed this post. I'll aim to get more regular at this, although I can't promise anything!
Enjoy your day and I'll see you soon.
Sharon :).
