Several days printing, in a residential retreat, with tutor Tony Ameneiro and 9 other keen printmakers was a great way to spend last week, and super stimulating.

Having no idea what his take on etching was and what materials we would be using I  put some forethought into some (hopefully) appropriate imagery to work on, or from.  Anyone following my blog knows I like to work with themes rather than just puddle around and produce prints that don’t have an underlying message or meaning to me.

Still being brain-immersed in connections and the like I reviewed my recent work and found myself as intrigued as ever by this idea but I needed a new challenge.  So instead of looking at manufactured, imaginary and external connections I chose to look internally, and so it was that I raided the internet (via google searches) and came up with some brilliant pictures of cells, skin tissue, muscle fibres, neurons, brain membrane and the like as my source material.

Looking Within project

My first choices to work from were these:

Clockwise from top left: brain cells, electron microscope various cells, brain neurons, cytokinesis

Clockwise from top left: bone cells, cellular membrane structure, fat cells, empty fat cells

I wondered whether they may be too fragmented so I considered striated imagery:

Clockwise from top left: areolar connective tissue, striated muscle fibres of the heart, bone calcification, skin tissue

Luckily, once settled into the class and with an understanding of how we would initially be working, my choices weren’t too bad.  So I started preparing my first print concept.