Flaming June

 Well, where did May and most of June go?  I have been here and I have been doing things but there seemed to be no time to blog so this is my mini round up and I cannot blog without talking about the heat. Whew! Scorchio! But what beautiful light it gave us in the early evenings........

 ....what glorious shadows in the unlikeliest of places

 ..... what tremendous moths it brought out into our nightly trap

 ... and what stunning colours it has produced in the garden

 Cosmos 'Dazzler'

 Lupin 'Thundercloud'

 Filipendula Venusta Rubra

.... and Geranium Sue Crug

I've had friends down to stay who have been working on their PhD's and foolishly thinking I could help them but I helped brainstorm a few ideas and they went home happy enough. I've also just returned from a weekend teaching folded book structures with a fabulous group of embroiderers in Cheshire. I took photos but they were awful so I cannot show some of the great things they produced. Sorry girls, if any of you are reading this.

I have a print I must get on with now for the lovely girls I am exchanging with in Australia. I am behind schedule but have started a collagraph plate today so it is happening. Once that is done I have no other commitments as such until September so I am firming up a summer project idea and will try to post some snippets as I go along. Given my current track record though..... we'll see!

Getting ready to play

 This was the view up to my shed yesterday. Another day of sunshine with a hint of a breeze. Perfect for my plan.
A few weeks ago an unexpected  place came free on a course run by my talented chum Sue Brown. It runs tomorrow and is gum arabic transfer on fabric. Now she has shown me this many times and sometimes I get it right and other times I don't but the chance to have a day away to play was too great to miss. Plus I am staying on in town after and catching up with an old work colleague that I have not seen for over 20 years. All in all, the prospect of a fabulous day out.

 I have more than enough fabric in my stash to take with me but a few weeks ago I came across the Instagram page of a cyanotype artist called Linda Clark Johnson. It was so interesting to see that she was playing with the process and pushing it by over exposing, leaving it in the rain and the dark etc for days rather than minutes! Then I noticed that the comments on her account came from lots of others also playing with the cyanotype variables. Most seem to live in warmer climates than mine but I contacted Linda to tell her that I will be giving this a try. I cannot resist trying to find new ways to come at something which is what I think I have been doing by using the process with rust and by also persisting with the ancient solution that I have, so it was a no brainer that the sunshine cried out for cyanotypes yesterday. I have fresh chemicals but there was still a lot of the 3 year old stuff left so I thought 'in for a penny' and coated a couple of strips of calico, thinking I might produce some extra fabric to use with the gum arabic transfers.

 The calico is quite thin and I left it exposed much longer than usual, however the solution washed out to a denim blue and looked very faded. Some of the marks were strong, others not so much but I was throwing everything at it as resists. It was a real mish mash, no thought to design or layout but I love the results.

 On the second strip I put some thin paper tags on top and then flowers etc on top of the tags so I got the best of both worlds. Now I have tag shapes on fabric to print into and paper tags to print onto if I so choose.

 The results of the solution were much stronger on the paper than the fabric and it was quite freeing to just leave it and not do the usual monitoring and timing.

 I love the results on the back of the tags as much as the front and I desperately want to use them in something that will showcase them as they are gorgeous. A real happy accident.

Finally I used the tail end of the soultion on some watercolour paper and some mount board. I've done this before and the mount board is perfect for book covers. Completely unrepeatable and not a proper cyanotype at all but again, I love the effect.
This morning I bleached  a couple of them and they've now turned yellow and white. They are drying in today's sunshine and whilst it is tempting to carry on I have resisted the urge. I have more than enough paper and fabric for tomorrow and my hands are blue. I dread to think what my friend will make of me after all these years. She'll take one look at them and think I have really let myself go so I'd better not make them worse today. Besides I have all summer to take advantage of the weather and play with the 'wet cyan' process that Linda has started. What fun there will be.

Spring colours?

 Some friends have asked me to run a day of monoprinting for them in  a couple of week's time. Most of them are selling artists but they all paint and I think printmakers use a different part of our brains so I am up for the challenge. I will probably concentrate on the subtractive side of monoprinting as I think it will appeal to they way they work but I must not assume and need to have all the areas covered on the day. I don't do monoprinting that often so I've been working in the shed for the past week or so revisiting all of the techniques and having a play. I have had a whale of a time and found myself chomping at the bit to get up there every day, something that I am guilty of avoiding if my mind is occupied elsewhere. I have stayed focussed and found a huge range of dried plant material I layered into a few telephone directories last summer and promptly forgot about.

 As is the way with monoprinting, once you start, one print leads to another as you amass all the stencil and printed elements and keep turning them over or printing a ghost. Some are unmitigated disasters but if you keep layering print on print you come up with some intriguing things. All are completely unrepeatable and when I look at some of them I am already hard pressed to know how they came to being! I have raced through a large pile of paper and am awaiting much needed supplies in order to continue.

 I've lost count of the number of prints I've pulled but as the paper supply dwindled I needed something to use up the ink I'd put out and I found a stack of small bookmarks in the drawer that I cut a couple of years ago for the UWE Bookmarks project. I tediously cut 100 of them and then went and did something else so they've languished there for a couple of years now.....

 Well, no longer as I started to use them to finish off the ink I'd put out. On the first session I was using black and a couple of days later I'd moved onto an Azure Blue. Each time I've put some aside and then worked on a few of them in the second colour. Today was colour number three, an intense cadmium orange. I'd been looking at some bedlinen online the other day in vibrant blue and orange and knew I just had to roll out the juicy citrus shade for today. I've almost got a bit carried away with something that I started merely to use up materials. Back to the real focus tomorrow I think. Time to get subtractive and roll out the black ink again. Can't beat a bit of monochrome monoprint!

Spring

' ..the flowers appear on the earth... the time of the singing of birds is come.' Song of Solomon 2:12
 

 It certainly is the time for birds and flowers. What a wonderful Spring we are having. Everything is lush and green and for once, Wales has had a respite from the usual rain which means flowers are lasting longer. Our amelanchiers and magnolias have been nothing short of sublime. Albeit fleeting in their appearance usually, this year has seen an abundance of blossom lasting at least a week longer. Just gorgeous, but I am often drawn more to the simpler things. After a gorgeous display of snowdrops this winter the banks have been taken over now by primroses. Masses of them. It is a long time since I've seen so many. I noticed yesterday that the violets are also now in flower next to them and the bluebells are on their way. We are at that pivot point of the year when you feel everything is about to tip into loveliness.

 It is sad therefore to mention birds singing and then show this poor thing.

 We had the hottest day of the year yesterday. I think Wales touched 20 degrees but it felt much hotter up by my shed which is very open. I was working away at something in the morning and when I came back after lunch I found this beautiful song thrush on the ground outside. There are stickers all over the door to stop birds flying into it but this one was under the window and I can only think it was the reflection on such a hot day that must have blinded it. I was only away for half an hour and was saddened to return to this sight.

He or she was given a proper burial after these photographs were taken and I've now put stickers all over the window as well. I wanted to draw it but it was so hot I knew we had to get it covered quickly. Earlier in the day I noticed a pair of song thrushes in our large ash tree and I have a horrible feeling that someone has now lost a mate.
There are signs of that Spring ritual all around us. We've had huge enjoyment watching a pair of sparring young male blackbirds fighting for territory. Every time we look over to our greenhouse area they are giving it their all. Whilst they are doing that in readiness for next year, there has been a pair going in and out of one of our bay trees right by the back door. It seems too early but they are going in and out with beakfuls of worms and when I stopped by it yesterday afternoon I could hear lots of tiny cheepings. I moved on quickly and left them to it as we never interfere with nature's way.
Whilst they are advanced other birds seem to be just getting going. There is joy for us because we keep seeing a pair of goldcrests and a pair of long tailed tits in our front garden flying between two bushes. I would find either of them nesting nearby a real treat.
This morning, whilst writing this, I've noticed a couple of male bullfinches and one female. The males are striking at this time of year. Their chestnut plumage deepens slightly and becomes a beacon to the female. It's not unusual for us to see them but it is never for too long so I must make the most of it.
Got to get back up to the shed and finish yesterday's project first though. Still working with those beetles. Obsessed with the things but might have to do something bird related now. Can't say I don't have enough going on around me to inspire something!

Displacement activity

 We had so much rain with those amazing storms yesterday that our grounds were waterlogged today. Getting up to my shed to finish some outstanding print work was out of the question unless I wanted to try it by canoe. So, I played around with something that had been in my head for a while.

 I've been putting a workshop together on flexible book structures like flexagons and quatragons and have become really interested in things that explore moving images like mutoscopes and zoetropes etc. In a conversation with a friend the other day we talked about using an interactive way to display work at the end of a course. She is a surface pattern designer and wanted to find a novel way to get people to look at her work. As I have been playing with similar ideas I suggested she look at kaleidocycles and how to make them on You Tube.

 Naturally, once I'd made the suggestion I had to give it a go myself. I found a downloadable template  and made a small one on an A4 sheet with a photo of some beetles that I had.

 Then I scaled it up to A3 and combined some colour and black and white beetle images, sticking the diamond shapes on to the card template individually to help understand how much one can control the composition of these things by where they are placed  and the orientation of them too.

 I really like the way they move in the hand and give you four viewing options as they are turned. Most of the online video tutorials focus on patterns , which might work for my friend,  but I think this is an idea that can be pushed further with thought. Once you understand that the template is a set layout of equilateral triangles you realise that the basic unit can be scaled up or down and can create some intriguing pieces.

With that in mind I've cut some larger triangles to try on paper up to A2 or A1 but the forecast is for dry weather tomorrow and I think I'd better plan to finish what I've started in the shed rather than continue with what I am calling 'displacement activity'. Good fun though. If you're interested in folding and playing do have a go.

Storm Warning

 I've been joining in with a pen and ink drawing group each Tuesday morning for the last few months. Today was our last meeting so we decided to visit an exhibition in St Davids about geology and artists' response to it. That was fascinating enough but the weather we had today was distracting as during our session we had sun, snow, hail and wind. All in the space of two hours. The journey home on the coast road takes me down and along the pebble bank of Newgale Beach. As I came down the hill today the sea was incredible. Waves were high and the sky was ferocious.

As I had my camera with me to take photos of our last get-together I decided to  walk up and see what I could capture. Newgale is a steep bank with a beach on the other side of it but the sea was so high today it almost looked level. Froth and spume was everywhere and the wind was very cold and whippy. I walked up one of the boardwalks put down to help get people up and over the pebbles and as I stood at the top panning round with the camera it felt like the wind was flaying my skin! Looking in the mirror when I got back into the car showed a very, very red and raw face and I was only out there for about 5 minutes as it hurt to stand there any longer.

The storms have persisted on and off for the rest of the day. Brooding skies and hailstones have been the norm. Someone told me today that early arriving house martins had been spotted in Tenby so they think it is Spring and have migrated home to breed. After today, I'd not be surprised if they didn't fly back to Africa, and quick!!

If this is Spring, roll on Summer....

Winter blues

After six weeks  I took the tapes from my hand this week as the fracture in my little finger is finally healed, but it is still swollen and I am unable to bend it much. Thinking that activity is the best medicine I looked at my list of 'things to try' that I jot down when the ideas come to me and set about trying to encourage my hand to return to normal duty.
I have become involved in trying out another alternative photographic technique this week (more later!) and whenever I go down this road my mind goes back to cyanotypes, the technique that started it all for me. Despite having new chemicals I still have lots of the solution that I made up for a workshop nearly three years ago and every time I say I won't use it again, I have to push it and see if there is anything left to it.

 I have cyanotyped on top of rusted paper before and thought I'd try it on fabric. The piece I chose is quite old and the rust marks were made with fabric laid out on bubble wrap and then rusted tools laid out on top, so it has a definite right side and wrong side as the bubble wrap clearly left an impression. I decided I'd make the wrong side, the right side,for this experiment and I soaked the fabric with the cyanotype solution. Interestingly the rust resisted the solution and it just sat on the top. I exposed it for about 15 minutes and the resist is clear by the fact that the rear of the fabric (above) is much paler than the front.

 Here on the front I put the acetate that I used for my screen print trying to see if the rust worked with the beetles.

 The results were great and now I am thinking about adding a gum arabic transfer on top of the print. Time will tell. In the meantime while I was waiting for the fabric to expose I found a pile of material that I'd either cyanotyped or indigo dyed many moons ago. I had started to make some patchwork pieces to use them up and obviously forgotten all about them. Now I've brought them back to the house and I started doing some more last night. Keeps the hands moving and is quite calming. Just love those blues but wishing for a bit more sunshine to play with rust and cyanotype again!