March 12th Eye Bowls Club

Lesley’s print workshop.
Nine of us blew in to the bowls club  today for Lesley’s printing workshop.
Lesley introduced us to Funky Foam, an adhesive backed dense foam sheet which can be cut into shape and stuck onto a foam board backing block to produce individual and quite intricate stamp patterns. 
this turned out to be an extremely versatile ‘tool’ Lesley demonstrated lots of different examples of the ways in which it could be used from the ‘formal’ registered print , to informal overlaying to create unique pieces. She had lots of examples to inspire us including her own beautiful textile work.

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You  can see from the finished examples how versatile this approach was, Some of us working with precision and some (me) lucky accidents. 

We spent the time before coffee drawing up our designs and cutting and constructing our ‘stamps’
and then used them in conjunction with Gelliplate printing plates and acrylic ink, to produce prints on a variety of papers, and creating different background effects.
( it’s amazing how beautiful a bit of scrunched up and smoothed out paper can look when pressed into a gelliplate)
Lesley is so knowledgeable about materials and techniques and  we all thoroughly enjoyed the space to play and experiment.
​We are very fortunate to have guild members with such expertise.

Avril experimented with different backgrounds and varied pressure to produce strong , bold, and also very delicate images with different backgrounds.

Maggie Ann used her own image of a hare top  left for her stamp, top middle ,and they were off, bouncing through the grass !


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Angela worked on an image of a smoke bush from her garden, (stamp top middle) using the autumn colours of the bush and overlaying images on different backgrounds keeping the same colour palate


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Ian C worked on some images, the tiger,for a convincing 3D effect from previous printing sessions, painting in stripes and cut a new Woodpecker stamp to work on further at home.


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Ian J had a very successful day with Crows! A selection of his work showing how effective carefully registering your images can be.


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Josie produced this lovely delicate image of a hare, the colours are quite a contrast to her normal palette, but work well together.


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Sally P worked on peacock images using different background techniques, and produced a lovely background image ( click on image for full effect) by leaving a ghost of a previous image and inking another colour over the top and then pulling off the combined image in a print.


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Here are my images, I really like the effect of not cleaning my plate and leaving a ghost images which I ink over and print.
top L is my roller clean off page which I drew into.


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And finally Lesley’s prints, many produced from the flower stamp, left hand middle. 
and layered images, again ghost prints inked up and printed over, top row.

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And this really is nearly the end…

• There is a sheet to sign up for Tom Cringle’s contemporary acrylic landscapes all day workshop on April 9th, cost £30.00. You can see examples of his work on www.tomcringle.co.uk
• Information and entry forms for our two up and coming exhibitions can now be found on the ‘exhibitions’ section of the website.
• on the Chairman’s messages section of the website there is a breakdown of results from Maggie Ann of the recent survey about the summer programme.
• Annual subscriptions are now due 
• Next week’s blogger will be Harriet

​Sally