Collograph 1

So picture me, youngest son in attendance, logging in to get him to help me upload pictures, only to find that I now have a toolbar, complete with picture icon, which was absolutely NOT THERE last time I looked. Needless to say, youngest son has yet another example of Mother going soft in the head!


Purple Missus asked what is a collograph. Basically, its a collage that you make prints from, so texture is all important. Everything has to be the same height, otherwise it won't print, so something that is a good texture won't necessarily print well.


The brief for my collograph was to make a print based on a textural study of a particular area, and I made a series of drawings, rubbings, and prints and took lots of photographs of the garden of the house we stayed at in southern France earlier this year.

What you have to do is stick stuff to cardboard, let the glue dry, then varnish it. These are some varnished blocks, ready for printing from. I used kitchen foil, sandpaper, pumpkin seeds, grasses, and gesso.



I printed the blocks using black acrylic paint with a bit of fluid retarder mixed in to make the paint last a bit longer. (Works quite well) The first lot are an attempt at creating a bark texture using scrunched up brown paper (left) and sandpaper. I started off with quite a fine sandpaper, then tried it with a much coarser sandpaper, but unexpectedly, the finer sandpaper is better. The next ones are made with thick piping cord. The one on the right the block moved, hence the double image.






This next one I used scrunched up kitchen foil to create tree bark, some vegetable nets to create moss on a wall, and some wonderful textured cardboard which arrived as packaging, but was extremely disappointing. Below that are some prints made from gesso blocks, which were an attempt at creating a stone wall. I layered gesso onto the card and then made marks in the gesso, but didn't find them very successful. In the end, I cut the blocks up into individual "stones" and stuck them down separatly , which I was much happier with.





Next step was to make a mock up of the finished collograph. The brief was to design a book cover for a book about texture, aiming to give a sense of place of the area I had studied. This was the second attempt.



All I have to do now is make the final block and make three prints, at least one of which has to be black and white. Going to finish my Christmas shopping on Monday, so will include a trip to the art shop to look for some hand made papers.