Summer has been and gone. We've had one of the wettest summers ever, and, to tell the truth, I feel more than a little cheated. Anyway, enough of that... Early summer was taken over with preparing for a big party that we had, that already seems like years ago, while the last couple of months or so I've been concentrating on making some linocut prints. The rediscovery of linocut relief printing has been a really exciting journey for me. My original intention was to prepare a couple of simple b/w prints for the Tryk2 exhibition that I'm taking part in, but I've been really taken by the whole working process, and now I'm thinking that linocuts are something I really want to explore and develop.
For a start, the whole working process itself is really fascinating. I've been doing 'reduction' linocuts, where you have just one linopad, and you dig out sections for each colour. This requires organisation, planning and discipline - qualities I don't bring to the studio - but this also forces you to really slow down and consider composition, colour, value, line, etc, in a way that can be strangely liberating. The technical side of it is really interesting as well, and I've been helped enourmously by the sometimes unwitting virtual mentoring of some fantastic artists and websites, especially Sherrie York and Ian Phillips. And I like the mechanics of it - it makes me feel like a real 'worker', rather than farting around with watercolours, if you know what I mean...
Anyway, you can see my efforts on the website. Steep learning curve. Mountains of rejects litter my studio.
Below I've uploaded some photos charting the development of a print I've made of some gulls and waders. This was inspired by some visits I made to a place called 'Dueodde' in early August, a sandy beach on the south eastern tip of the island, where the wet weather had created a large lagoon. For a period this was a really popular stopping-off point for multitudes of waders, gulls and terns, many on their way south after breeding in the Arctic, and a really exciting place to see a lot of different birds all together. The three or four times I went during this period, the light was fantastic, and I was taken with the reflections, ripplies, colours - the whole lot really. The way the shadows and light of the gulls' backs created an almost abstract dappled pattern... the moving reflections...
Well, I made loads of sketches, and started developing some ideas. Original sketches included tons of different waders, caspian, sandwich, and common terns, 3 or 4 gulls species (at one point I think I had about 20 different species in the viewfinder) -but I reigned in the inner bird-nerd and calmed it down a bit. I concentrated on the contrast between the gulls and the oystercatchers, and sprinkled a few dunlin in to create a more lively composition.On the top left you can see my efforts to reduce the amount of colours to something manageble for a lino print. This was really hard, as I wanted to keep the differece in value between reflections, wings, etc. This image really helped me out. It's amazing how much work the eye does as it seeks to understand surfaces and colours, I think it's called chromatic adaptation...
Anyway, here are the tools, and the linopad, as I was working through it. I highlight the next stage of cutting, to make it easier. Still made a few mistakes though...
This next image shows all the different colours I printed, on the left coloumn, and all the colours on top of each other as they appeared on the paper. 7 in all - far too complicated. 
