Author: giram1992

Lino What?

It’s been some time since my last blog post even though i’ve covered alot at college getting into a pattern of writing i’m finding hard to get into a rhythm that i will certainly address over time.

Well lino printing is essentially the process of creating a large stamp.

drawing your desired image directly onto the lino in some form of marker or fineliner just like my experimental images above or using graphite as an impression on transfer or carbon paper to lay the foundation for the next part in the process.

Next stage in the process was grabbing the specific lino cutting tools and carving away at the parts that will become the background leaving the outline or body of the desired images for printing.

by applying different weight and angles when carving helped change the density and texture of various line work.

with practice I’m sure this can be mastered and applied to future works that will only strengthen the artwork.

Personally i found all of this process very therapeutic and am excited to continue experimenting with this much further as our main task project is working from contextual research on urban environments and image bellow evolved from a sketch of the side building of the college.

Onto the messy part, taking a roller and evenly applying block printing ink onto the lino but I’d imagine you could no doubt use acrylic for this as a substitute.

Here in the bottom image was my first attempt using just black and i was amazed at the quality for my first attempt as its such a traditional method but has most certainly stood the test of time when it comes to visual impact.

still my mind certainly started thinking what else can be done here and all sorts of mad experiments i didn’t have time to try them all.

For my second try i added a base of navy blue and then applied a scarlet red offset by a millimetre to give a monochromatic 3D esque style which certainly helped a number of my experimental designs visually pop in comparison to the flat black counterpart.

Heading back to the primary project of the urban environmental work we where tasked with making a continuous pattern with our lino but due to the non symmetric nature of mine this was rather tricky so i took my experiment above and transferred it to here.

By layering the print in black, red then yellow and rotating the lino from portrait to landscape in-between has helped cover the non symmetry of my piece and has helped portray that mine is interwoven like tartan, this was not done on purpose it was by sheer chance that this was achieved.

Like all forms of art, experiment have fun and let’s Revolutionise this hobby.

For those who are more visual learners rebecca over at WilhelmMiniatures has done a fantastic tutorial their.

I am in no way an affiliate of this product but you can grab yourself a starter set over on amazon very cheaply and start having as fun as i am.

Remember #Hobbyrevolution if you do make anything, I’d love to check it out.

Who am I?

Moving on from our first little project we have continued exploring different methods we can incorporate into portraits. This time around rather than using available scrap materials we where advised to see what we could achieve with just packing cardboard and acrylic.

My chosen portraits to work from where of the worn elderly Gentleman above in A4 and of the highly masculine gentleman below in A3.

To start we began tracing the reference images planning out each layer of the face.

So to best know what areas would be more pronounced when we move to the next stage of building our pieces up.

Now that we have our maps of the faces it was just a case of using the drawn shapes to create stencils for cutting the card.

Layering the pieces upon each other adding depth and character to the piece.

Our next stage was on deciding our colour pallete and going back to our initial traces.

For the elderly gentleman i tried to restrict myself to cold colours to put emphasis on his age, using grays and blues being almost corpse like.

As for the masculine chap i took allot of colour inspiration from abdulrazaq awofesos’ work, he’s the artist we studied during this project and i went in the complete opposite direction of the first piece, deciding on warm and vibrant colours to portray strength and energy.

Then it was time to put brush to card and finish. In the end i decided to leave the eyes out of my works as the brief of “Who am i?” left me with profound thought that it would add them with some mystery and yet can still feel the age and energy in the other.

First Project at College

So first day of college was on monday. After the settling in and getting to know my fellow class mates and tutors we were given our first little class project which will be shown to the public on a yet to be decided date.

The project is rather simple, we were split into groups of 3 and 4 to choose from a selection of portraits and to recreate them in the style of collage like the very well known Peter Clark.

The portrait in which we chose above was of an elderly gentleman which from our view portrayed a lived life. We Incorporated many tones of different scrap media but felt that using a map as the base best fit our underlying message that he was a man of exploration.

As the map was light in colour our next step was to incorporate other tones to add more depth to our portrait adding yellows and oranges to best resemble the heavy wrinklesand folds he bears.

As the project went on during the day we became rather chaotic and the first group to incorporate 3d elements to our Piece, adding scrap netting to best represent his fantastic facial hare.

So towards the end of our collage we started to lean into the idea that he was either some sort of pirate or south american dictator. Really enjoying this small project and look forward to sharing my class mates work in the next day or two with a rundown explanation as deadline for submission is by the end of thursday.