A work in progress

So, I have been watching a barn owl quartering the fields – a view from my living room window, how lucky am I?- and building up enough gusto to start on another big collagraph plate. I thought I would post this as a ‘work in progress’ and I will update it as I go along. So I started with a tiny thumbnail which I took straight to the plate and worked up as a sketch.

From the thumbnail straight to the plate

The next step was to decide how to use tone to build the image.  I decided to cut the owl out;  peeling the smooth surface of the card away to reveal the texture of the under-layer. This would print as a dark owl shaped silhouette and I could add lighter tones with hammerite. It was necessary to redraw the owl so that I knew where to paint!

So here you can see the plate and the proof with the hammerite highlights. It was necessary to sand some of the hammerite back because it raised the rough texture of the card but I quite liked the way this added to the textures of the feathers.

There is still more to be done. This plate is at a dangerous stage – it looks as though it is going to work well but, I have to add more highlights to the body and it could go badly wrong.

So keep your fingers crossed and I will post the finished print when I can…if I don’t then I am probably sulking about the temperamental nature of printmaking!

Next installment I decided it needed more foliage so I sketched it out onto the proof cut it all out and then printed it again. Here is the final image.