I chose to do a relief print of a large acrylic painting I had done some years ago (see smaller picture) and combine it with the image of the Uffington White horse which I felt would work well as a wood cut. I had really enjoyed working with wood cuts as a progression from lino in the experimental mark making section of this course.
I planned to do a 4 colour reduction wood cut A3 size. The wood cut would be used to depict the distant hills and horse with a framework of hedges surrounding the various fields. I then planned to use a different block exploiting a different textural characteristic for every field. This seemed like a good idea at the time but proved to be a time consuming and ambitious project with 12 separate blocks to prepare, register and print.
The time consuming bit was not the cutting of the large woodblock, which I did from a beautiful piece of beech laminate, but letting every print dry before printing from the next block.I did a series of 5 in total and each one has its own characteristics. The one I finally chose to mount was chosen mainly because the registration is better than the others and there are less finger smudges and stray bits of unwanted ink.
I wanted to convey the feeling of an ancient chalk landscape with the white horse in the distance and a chalk road taking the viewers eye through the texturally interesting landscape. I achieved this. The composition works well and whereas the original painting had no focal point at the end of the track, the white horse provided this in the print. I liked the sinuous line of the track and hedges and I particularly liked some of the shapes of the fields which were interesting in their own right.
It was surprising how inventive one can get when looking for interesting textures to print and my favourite was the reverse of a piece if lino using the coarse hessian to get the effect of a ploughed field. Other things I used were bits of rough cut timber and pieces of card painted onto with a hog hair brush.
Again, planning well with colour notes and experimental prints and drawings made the whole thing more successful but some of my failings included not keeping my hands clean and in poor registration. My printing technique is getting better but I really need to be more meticulous with the process and make sure the ink only goes where it is supposed to!
Whilst I am relieved that this final project in the relief printing part of the course is over I had hoped that my print might have a certain atmosphere but alas it doesn't. The quality of 'atmosphere' I am looking for is not there because the tonal values are not quite correct, the darks are too dark and the range of tones too wide. Had I kept to a lower tonal and chromatic key I might have achieved the effect I was looking for.
On the whole I like relief printmaking and particularly like working with wood.
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