This week consisted of printing the below image of my brother, a portrait I very much enjoyed drawing, the composition and details of the portrait came together really well. Using a razor to scrape away the crayon I managed to get a fine reflection on the glasses to give the portrait a little more life through detail.
I then began work on the pattern that will make the background of my portraits, each pattern will be different for each person in the portrait. I have taken inspiration from the use of symbols in aboriginal paintings and interpreted this in my own way by having symbols and marks for each person to represent their personality, life and aura.
To do this I have used litho drawing ink with a wide brush to create big strokes for the marks, in my sketchbook I have drawn the shapes and marks I plan to include in each design and have labelled them with meanings for each thing. For example on the stone below in the top middle there is a semi circle shape with lines coming off it, this is representative of the sun, and also the more wavy lines represent the sea, as my mum spent a lot of her time by the sea growing up and in hotter climates.
I had yet to decide whether I wanted this pattern to be printed over the stone in a blue or brown ink so yesterday I decided to print the stone in blue first and then brown on newsprint, so I could compare how the pattern looked when printed. However this attempt turned out to be unsuccessful, I haven't got any photos of the results as I ended up in a bit of a rut on what to do and got distracted! But I began with a blue ink with a little bit of extender but the colour was way way to dark, so I tried to move onto the brown ink but the blue that I had already printed with was so overpowering that it was coming up dark in the brown ink.
What I decided was that I really wanted the pattern to print very faded behind the portrait, almost like how it looks when washed out with turps in the photo in the middle above. After a discussion with Andrew we decided that what I needed was to print with a lot of extender and then the smallest amount of coloured ink just to give it a tint. What I had been doing before was using ink but with only a small amount of extender. So I have taken myself away from it for a few days and will approach this next week to see if approaching it on another day gives me a more successful day of printing.
Then finally I have started this portrait above, which is the first out of four portraits of my closest friends that I will do. I will continue with this into next week.
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