FOCUS STUDY

This focus project will combine previous skills learnt in line, shape, and colour.

Process - creating your plate.

1. Do a series of continuous line drawings of plants and leaves from surrounding areas

2. select some of the drawings to simplify down to simple organic shapes.

3. cut these shapes out of thin card [cereal box] and arrange them on a thicker card "plate" in an interesting composition. Think about cropping, focal point and rotation and repetition. You can add lines and details with a biro pen or skewer

4. You can add extra texture with corrugated card, string, hot glue etc

5. Glue shapes down thoroughly and allow to dry

6. Coat your printing plate on both sides with Shellac to seal it.

Process Printing

Colour 1 [lightest ochre or yellow]

1. Use a hard roller to roll printing ink across your plate. You only need a small amount of ink. Too much and you will lose detail. Use an old brush to get yellow into the areas the brayer [roller] cant access [ONLY DO THIS WITH YELLOW - NOT RED/BLUE]

2. Place a clean piece of paper over the top and run through the press

3. Repeat this step 3 times

Colour 2 [red]

1. roll ink over plate [focus on the shapes and less red in the background]. You need to use less ink then the yellow - otherwise you're just covering all the yellow

2. Line plate up exactly on top of one of your yellow prints. Flip it over and run through the press

3. Repeat this on one other yellow print [leave one just yellow]

Colour 3 [Blue] repeat as per colour 2, again focus on the shapes and less ink in the background. Experiment with rolling just sections..

Extension: you can do some single black prints on white or on a watercolor/painted background