Newsletter #8
This week has been a week of gel plate printing. On Sunday I did my first class of the year at the ArtShack in Shrewsbury. Things went extremely well there. The piece top left of the figure is the demonstration piece I made for the workshop. Everyone went home with prints they were very happy with, which makes me equally happy. So much so that I spent the week working on gel plate monoprint derived images exclusively. The three other images above all created using gel plates, and with varying media to implant the image onto the gel plate. I’ve got a few brands of oil pastel, so mostly it’s been oil pastel. My favourite oil pastels, by far and away are Senneliers original oil pastels, there really is no competition in that media from what I have experimented with. The biggest difficulty with the Sennelier oil pastels is the cost - whereas I can get a pack of 36 Pentel oil pastels for about six or seven pounds, that literally buys three oil pastels from Senneliers massive colour range of oil pastels. So where possible I try to use the cheaper brands, and experiment accordingly, although, it has to be said, discipline will never be my key strength. It’s so easy to just get carried away with Senneliers oil pastels, as did happen this week.
Using oil pastels with the gel plate is quite simple - I use the oil pastel as a resist image. Once that’s complete i then roller out a coat of paint onto the gel plate, and place the image into the gel plate, and leave for a few minutes. What areas that aren’t oil pastel covered pick up the paint, and leaving it for a few minutes to do this helps with details i found. I then scrape away the residual paint over the oil pastel - Here's a video short of me removing the oil pastel . This is a very pleasing way of revealing the image, and it also adds some organic randomness into the image making process, placing it face down into a paint coated gel plate.
In fact it’s been so much fun it’s literally all i have done this week. Now i’ve got to the stage where i will be using this approach to make some in-roads into my larger panotrait project, that has been on a back burner this year so far. But with this new way of quickly producing very pleasing effects, i feel the time is right to get the ball rolling again with that behemoth of a project……….
So it’s only a short newsletter this week, and hopefully I’ll have more to report about next week as i get back to my larger project. Thanks for reading again,
Josh