The Cave: chine colle

The Brief

Present a series of prints (minimum four) which incorporate chine colle techniques. They will include a variety of thin papers, metal foil and other materials. The prints will be in different colour schemes and printed on different types of paper.

To support your work you will have drawings and themes starting from original ideas and developed to the layout of your final prints.

For this project I had a number of possible ideas in mind:

  • ‘The dance’ from some other African sketches in the style of Christine Okunjili and Matisse cut-outs. But I found it difficult to make these work at this size and had selected this these for project 13.
  • African street scenes (see below, logbook 5 and Images of Africa sketchbook) and these were what I sent to my tutor, but I again I found it difficult to make these work at this size – they were too static.
  • A series of seascape/rockpool asbtracts from my Cornwall sketchbook. Variations on this last were what I finally decided to go for for the assessment.

Seascape Abstracts

Sketches from ‘Image of Cornwall’

1.1_LansdscapeMark-1

I started by looking through the sketches and photographs in my Sketchbook. I was interested in trying something a bit more abstract than the large Cave Monoprint. I did some doodles on my iPad from the photographs of shells and rockpools – thinking first of doing a linocut overlaying flat colours/textures and also some foil and textured paper like the textured monoprints I had done for assignment 1. I also did some new black acrylic and chalk drawings to get a sort of mood and feel I wanted to convey in the pieces. I also decided to cut up and experiment with some very large watercolour life paintings that I had done for Project 13 but had not really worked – as ‘found landscapes’. I really liked the way the paint interacts on the paper and this led me to think more along the lines of something totally abstract.

Watercolour and digital mockup

From the cut up watercolour I selected one image that I thought would be interesting, and could be developed with the sort of mood I had in mind. I then experimented with colour combinations on my iPad. I discovered that if I turned the image around I could get very different images – landscapes with rocks, stalactites and stalagmites and so on.

Based on this I then made up a collagraph plate using fabric, bubble wrap, string, netting and card on different areas of the plate. And started to experiment with different colours in different areas. I started by using bought tissue paper, but found this a bit boring. Then I thought of using some of the papers I had used for cleaning my plates and rollers after inking – I found a lot of the textures interesting and had been saving them for collage. So I started to look for ‘found’ images that I could put on different areas of the plate. I found the possibilities were endless!

Some images were already nearly there, just needing a part of the plate as an interesting:

Others were built up in a much more planned manner:

Another discovery was the often accidental nature of the interaction between the found image and the overlaid plate – sometimes images appeared by mistake as in ‘Woman and Pig’ where I had intended this to be a picture of a tree, but forgot which way round the printing was and ended up printing over the tree. Only to find it actually made the body of a woman. So I could add a head. And the shape next to her just happened to look like a pig with a huge gaping mouth. With a bit of narrative this is an interesting image I think.

Woman and pig
Woman and pig

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.