For the last couple of months I’ve been working on abstracting designs from drawings and photographs, trialing stencils and masking techniques, exploring textural prints and creating layers. All this for my current project entitled Minimal – having put my Brain Clutter book project to one side while I complete this.

This post contains a ‘dump’ of material and techniques which demonstrates the planning and experimentation that goes into my work – essentially a behind-the-scenes view of print samples, some of which worked and some which didn’t give the results I had hoped for. All have been fun and provide me with useful resources to consider incorporating, or pushing further, within this project and in the future.

A range of rolling, stippling and paper stencilling/masking, building layers.

An acetate stencil was cut and printed positive, negative and from the base matrix (perspex sheet), then applied over a prepared background.

An acetate mask was applied over a printed and stamped background.

An acetate stencil was printed positive, negative and from the base matrix (perspex sheet).

Left: Inked kozo fibre, printed from perspex plate.
Right: Wallpaper was applied over an inked perspex sheet and run through the press, thereby transferring ink to the surface. This was run through the press, transferring the design to paper.

Left: Rolled ink, torn paper resist & threads.
Right: ‘Tree bark’ effect wallpaper, printed from print matrix (perspex sheet) and from wallpaper directly.

Stencil and mask used with multiple layers of rolled ink. Threads were added between layers to create the impression of texture.

This is a small sample of an enormous pile of pieces I’ve been working on. Some have developed into pages for my Minimal book and will be shown in further blog posts.