Outside my comfort zone - again

You know how you coast around from blog to blog and suddenly see an idea that inspires you? The trick is remembering where you saw the idea so you can, (a) go back to it later and (b) give credit for where you took your inspiration from. On Friday at my art group I had a play with a narrow canvas and ended up with the textured surface you can see below. I had previously prepared the canvas with various textured layers, cobweb, tissue, torn doily, torn handmade paper, sand and acrylic flakes.

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I'm still trying to decide whether it needs tweaking a little. I started out thinking it was going to be based on a seascape but my dear friend challenged me to use colours outside my comfort zone hence the red and gold theme!

Getting back to the "where did I see that?" theme, I had a lot of paint left over from the canvas and didn't want to waste it. In the last few days I had seen a blog where someone (oh dear, I've forgotten who!) had made some monoprints using plant material from the garden, so I thought I would use the leftover paint in the same way. I used a little thickening medium to give the paint more of a printing ink quality.

I forgot to take a photo of the plate before I took any prints so this is the plate after the prints were taken. I had included strawberry leaves, grass stalks and grape hyacinth seed heads and sprinkled grass seeds over the surface.

I placed a piece of dampened cotton on top of the plate (plastic sheet) and gently smoothed the fabric down onto the paint. Some of the paint did seep through to the reverse of the fabric so once I felt it had soaked up enough colour I slowly pealed the fabric back to reveal the image above.

This is the second print from the plate, not quite as strong as the first.

The next step was to lift off the plant material as I wanted to see what marks were left behind.

I really like this print which came off the partially cleared plate.

Because I had still got gold paint on the palette I set another print block up and took another print. I used the grape hyacinth seed heads again and as they had retained some of the red paint a hint of red crept in which I really like.

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I am seriously thinking that I will paint the fabric, particulary the red versions, with a loose green wash to offset the red. What do you think?

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By the way, if you recognise this process from your own recent blog please accept my apologies and also leave me a comment. Many thanks.