First of all, sorry for the super long hiatus- between the Easter hols and life stuff in general, I’ve been busy sorting out various aspects of this project- it’s been a journey, but we made it!
In terms of finalising the imagery for print production, I had a few issues with the Dragon image- when I’d first decided on the central elements of each print, I was acutely aware that if I didn’t execute it properly the Dragon image would be a bit… cheesy looking. Maybe it’s just my spin on things, but dragons are inherently a bit lame so I really had to work to make sure my print wasn’t typical/lame. I feel like it’s halfway in-between haha- not quite cringey, but also not really what I envisioned, which is a bit of a shame. I based the imagery off a decorative wall within the traditional Yuyuan Garden in Shanghai:
I thought this was a really unique part of the architecture within the garden, and this helped me immensely while I was designing this part of the imagery ❀
The koi, as previously noted in my Durham University visit posts (here and here), was influenced by reference imagery taken during my outing. This was the easier of the two prints to design, as the subject matter lends itself towards the type of aesthetic I was going for~
I won’t document the actual printing process here (more info in my research folder) as that’s already been covered on this blog here, but my final two designs turned out much nicer than expected! The new ink colours really helped too, as I was able to use a much cooler, less harsh palette of blue, teal and purple. I really knocked down the opacities on all four layers, which produced a lovely painterly effect…
…in fact, the resulting imagery was so nicely processed that I didn’t even want to embellish on top of these! I did some tests with metallic inks, pens and foil leaf on a failed print from my first printing attempt, and honestly the results were nice, but didn’t enhance the prints at all. The embellishment appeared very heavy compared to the plain prints, so I decided to ultimately leave this part of my proposed process out, since I felt it detracted from the final product too much. That’s not to say I regret researching into this so much- I can undoubtedly use these techniques in the near future, as I plan to work with printmaking often once I graduate.
Targets for the coming weeks include… doing the entire Cheltenham Awards project because I’ve left it so late! As well as continuing to build and collate my portfolio ready for hand in ♥
More in a few weeks once I’ve made a good start on the next project!
References
China Discovery (n.d.). Yuyuan Garden: ‘Dragon Crossing the Clouds’ [photograph]. Available at: https://www.chinadiscovery.com/shanghai/yu-garden.html [Accessed 12 Apr 2019].
Collingwood, C. (2019). Chinese Dragon Risograph Print [risograph print].
Collingwood, C. (2019). Japanese Koi Risograph Print [risograph print].
Collingwood, C. (2019). Risograph Embellishment: Gold Leaf Test [risograph print, gold and silver leaf].
Collingwood, C. (2019). Risograph Embellishment: Metallic Ink Test [risograph print, metallic inks].
Collingwood, C. (2019). Risograph Embellishment: Metallic Pen Test [risograph print, metallic pen].
chalon joy collingwood 