Lighthouses

Thought I'd share some images of one of my favourite subjects, Lighthouses.

There's just something about a lighthouse that captures the imagination and stirs up a little wanderlust.  Whenever I think about lighthouses, I get an image in my head of a lonely old lighthouse keeper climbing the spiral stairs with his oil lantern amidst a howling storm outside....

I'm pretty sure I can thank my Dad for my love of them; he has always loved them and  I think that's infectious. Anyway, enjoy the pics.

(I didn't take these photos, I have uploaded them from Pinterest. They didn't have any credits to them, so if you are reading this and you know who they belong to please let me know! They are all amazing images.)

 

New Products and an upcoming fete!

Given To Art has a new look and will very shortly have a brand new Etsy site!

We are branching out into handcrafted paper products as well as still keeping the original artwork and prints available.

Also at the end of November we will have a stall at the Families on the Green Fete in Waikiki, Western Australia. 

To celebrate the new look, here's a sneak peak of some of the products that will be available.

Our list of products will include vintage style pinwheels made from comic book paper, gorgeous menu boards and noteboards, assorted bunting flags including amazing Superhero comic book papers, and vintage style gift tags.

Also to be on the site; a smaller range of Christmas products - hand drawn and watercoloured gift tags and paper star garlands from vintage book papers.

Of course it almost goes without saying that prints of my work will be available as well as gorgeous original decor artwork.

Stay tuned for details of the site as soon as it's up and running!

Multi Colour Screen Print tutorial

I am participating in a printmaking group exhibition/exchange next month, and so I am currently in the process of making 35 screenprints. Screen printing wasn't covered in my arts degree, so I taught myself. I love the industrial-ness of the resulting prints. I find the whole process fascinating and while there are plenty of tutorials available, a lot of them are confusing, or focus mainly on creating the stencil using emulsion and light boxes.

I use the drawing fluid and screen filler method, and while at some point I'd love to have a more complex set up and be able to create far more intricate prints, for now this suffices well. So I thought I'd post a tutorial on how to create a multiple colour screen print using this method.

Step one is to gather your supplies:

I use Speedball Drawing Fluid and Screen Filler - I bought them online via Dick Blick but most art supply stores will stock them. You will need a squeegee, screens (not in this picture), ink (in this image you can see screen ink as well as white acrylic paint and print paste which when added together make screen ink for paper prints!) and also something to clean your screens. I use Washing Soda which you can buy cheaply at most supermarkets - you can buy dedicated screen cleaners but they are expensive and washing soda and a nail scrubbing brush do the same job for much less.



Step two is to choose your design and translate it to different layers of colour.

 

My image is a sketch I did (excuse the sideways photos). It was the right size and I thought it would translate well with the shadows and highlights to a screen printed image. 

I traced over the image to create a line drawing, then I retraced that drawing onto two sheets - the first one (red in this photo) is what will form the black outline and the last layer of my image. The other one (black in this photo) is what will be the middle layer of my print.



Step three is to create a registration for your screens. This is to make sure all your layers print in the same place on the image (so over the top of each other).

I have plastic over my backing plate for easier clean up of ink. Place your printing paper on the plate, place your original traced image over the top and move it around until you have the desired location for your final image on your print paper. Take some tape (masking tape or paper tape) and tape the outline of two or three sides. (see the brown tape in the above image).

The above image shows the paper butted up against the top left corner of the tape - if I place all my papers at this spot, they will all print on the same place on the paper, provided my paper is all the same size as well. (I use a scrap piece of paper cut the same size as my desired final paper size for all these steps so as to not mark my good paper).
Keeping your traced image on top of your paper, lay a screen over the top of them, and secure it to the backing plate. Then trace your image onto your screen using a graphite pencil. Do this for each screen layer - that is, use your separate layer traces for each screen colour you  want. (This is why you made separate traced layers earlier).

After you have sketched all of your screen layers, take your screens and 'paint' over the lines you've drawn with the blue drawing fluid.

 Let that dry and then pour some of the brown screen filler over your screen, and use your squeegee to smooth it over the screen (including over the areas you've painted with blue drawing fluid). Once that is dry, you can put your screen under running water and using your fingers, gently rub over the screen - the areas you painted with drawing fluid will come away, leaving clear open screen mesh. (This is where your ink will flow through).

So when you have done that you will be left with something like this:

The white areas are where the ink will flow through the screen and the brown is the screen filler. (Ignore the darker areas on my screens - that's just where the mesh is ink stained from previous prints and won't affect the final print in any way).

I am including an initial layer of background colour in my print, so I painted free hand onto a third screen.

Again, ignore the black lines on the screen, the white area is what I will be printing.

Next step is to set up your first practice print (doing a few practice prints allows you to make sure your image will turn out like you want, that you haven't made any mistakes with the stencils you've created, and to test your colours)
Put your paper in place on your backing plate, and secure your first screen into the plate.

I find that flooding my screen results in better prints, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary if you don't want to do it. To do it, you place ink on the top of your screen and squeegee down, but keep your screen off your paper for this first go through.

Now you can lay your screen flat onto the paper, put a little more ink on the screen, and holding your squeegee at a 45 degree angle, pull smoothly downwards towards you, essentially scraping the ink over the mesh. Keep your strokes nice and smooth, and repeat until you have a nice even coverage. (If you need to lift your screen to check the ink, do so slowly and carefully so as to not move the paper and thereby ruin your registration!)

You can then take out your paper, and set it aside to dry. I don't have a drying rack, and if you are making small editions you can get by without one. But for this large edition I needed something to dry the prints without fear of them getting dirty, or dusty, or one of the children inadvertently 'investigating' and accidentally ruining my hard work!!

So I improvised! I have used our clothes rack, and to dry the prints I simply place a small piece of masking tape in the centre of the BACK of the print (masking tape because it won't rip the paper when I remove it), and tape the paper to the wires like so:

I can fit my edition of 35 onto this rack no problems, the prints will dry straight without buckling or touching each other and smudging the ink! Genius! After the first layer is dry, you take the same piece of paper and making sure your registration lines up, repeat the inking process with your second colour, lay it aside to dry and repeat for your third colour and so on.


Just to possibly make it a little clearer, here are the three individual 'layers' from my three separate screens, printed on three separate sheets of paper.

And here is the image printed on one sheet of paper as a final screenprint.

Screenprinting is much like reduction lino printing, in that you need to mask away the areas that you want to keep white. So long as you remember that the parts you paint with blue drawing fluid are the parts you want to have colour on your print, and the parts you want to keep white (or any other colour you've already inked up), should be covered in screen filler (the brown stuff), you can't go too wrong! But like any printing process, it only really becomes clearer once you are doing it. It's easy to get confused but once you start printing it will make sense to you!

Does creativity make you a little bit crazy?

Sometimes I think I have to be a little bit crazy to be me. My life is ordinary in so many ways, yet in others it is so less than ordinary. I mean, I have 5 children for a start! In this day and age it's fairly uncommon to have more than a couple of kids so when you say to people you have 5 of them, their reactions range from astonishment to admiration and sometimes absolute horror! My less than ordinary life continues with the fact that I met my wonderful husband over the internet (shock horror!!), through a shared interest and he moved halfway around the world to live here with me. Again, people's reactions to this little tidbit of information vary greatly although I like to think that most people are genuinely happy for us.

I am also an artist, which is a less than ordinary profession. I think it's one that the general public lay very little stock in, and for the most part, believe that it's not really much of a profession.  I don't make much money - I certainly could make more with a more traditional, no, expected profession. Because being an artist is actually quite a traditional profession: art has been around for as long as we have been able to call ourselves human, and the profession of ART has been in existence longer than many many others....(think receptionists....real estate agents....sports players...etc). Yet for the most part the stereotype of the starving artist has been longstanding and accurate. There is a miniscule percentage of artists who make enough to earn a decent living, and an even smaller percent who become rich off their profession. So the question stands: do you need to be crazy (even just a little bit?) to be an artist, or is being an artist something that is inherent within some people rather than a conscious choice?

For me at least, the decision to try and make a living from being an artist is a conscious one, but the need to create and be creative is absolutely inherent within my being. It is part of who I am and it makes me me.

I lie awake at night sometimes with a million different ideas running through my head, and I stand in the shower (where I think a lot of us do our best thinking....something about the running warm water is very soothing and thought provoking), imagining various ideas into reality in my mind.

I do believe that creativity makes you slightly crazy though, and I understand the other longstanding stereotype, that of the crazy artist. Sometimes I have so much in my head that I struggle to get it all out and I think I come off as a little (or a lot) nuts. I also believe though, that the slight insanity makes me a happier and more accepting person. After all, if I can live with the chaos that takes place in my own mind and life, I can accept the crazy from others. (For the most part at least!!) Creativity is a part of my soul, and without it life would be a dull colourless and boring version of what I have.  So for me, I'll take the slight craziness that inevitably ensues with a smile, and say thanks. I'll leave you with an image I've shared on here before, but I think it sums up the inside of my brain nicely; full of chaos and colour, and the odd flying turtle too.

Imagination, mixed media on canvas, Sarah Wherry 2012