Well it has been a busy first few weeks for me at the Ochre Print Studio as their new artist in residence. There is a studio linked exhibition later in the summer and so I have been trying to prepare work for that while also experimenting a bit. So my trials with overlaying colours are still ongoing waiting for additional layers to be added.
For the exhibition I have been working with some of my recent drawings and incorporating elements of colour within them. This requires some careful registration which I am improving at but a few prints get lost along the way as they don’t get lined up. So far I have just added one colour at a time so not to overwhelm them. I try to find colours which allow the piece to sing rather than be too dull. Two examples are below.

I went on to try one with a large area of black which is something difficult to achieve by drawing as it rarely remains even. To start with, even with the printing there was a similar problem and the large area of black also seemed very dull. I decided to try an undercoat. I used ultramarine as this was also used in the pink mixed for the shape.

It provided a black with far more richness. I used the same image for the blue and the black inks. What was interesting was that in the final prints if the blue and black layers were slightly out of registration it gave an interesting tonal variation from the pink. Unfortunately this is not possible to distinguish in the photo below.  A bit of a break for Easter now and then back to my experiments.