My first experiences of printing on paper.

I have been lucky enough to have had opportunity to draw my friends' animals and also a recent visit to South Lakes Safari Park.

I have been learning the process of transferring an image onto a file (sometimes with bitmapping) though most of my drawings were clearly defined in one strong colour, as most were in ink, and so could be scanned in directly.

With patient help from a kind person in the Print Lab, we have managed to get acetates produced, and from these you can choose whether to make a screen (incorporating several images) for use with paper, or a different type for use on clay.

As far as I could see, the results on paper worked really well, and I am very pleased with the prints that came out.

Loading up the printing frame. The ink if stored in an airtight container lasts a long time. I used orange, with a touch of red, and brown, with a touch of red too.

This is an acetate produced which is used to make the screens. Below is the printed Cheetah. You will notice that I have laid the acetated down the wrong way round.....makes no difference, the cheetah is just facing the other way! Apparently there is a specific way round that people draw, depending on whether you are right or left handed.

These are the rest of the prints (so far!)

This is a cockerel of the variety, Lemon Sable Poot, Millie Fleur

A relaxing Spider Monkey

Canada Lynx

Luka

Family of Southern White Rhinos

My friend's horse

I have also been busy with a few platters, here is work in progress, drying in the kiln room. Plus some test tiles to start the experimentation process of combinations of coloured slips on different clays, with different scgraffito marks and different glazes eventually. This should aid my decision process to pick the right combination for the right job. Marks made using simple tools found in my pottery tool kit.

Using sgraffito on orange and yellow slip under black. I wanted to see particularly if using a textured cloth to roll out the clay underneath helped the scraped back design. Nod to palimpsest.