SOLSTICE AVENUE PREPARATIONS

Readers of this sorry excuse for a blog might remember that for the last couple of years I've been producing a very limited number of prints made with gold dust to commemorate the winter solstice. The last two were of holloways, and this year I've branched out (ha ha) into avenues. It was kind of hard to work out how to draw it, but instead of boring you with a lengthy description, I'll put some photographs up here and try to explain the process of preparing to make the print.

I couldn't work out how to make it work for a while, as the avenue drawings I've been doing in pencil have white space around the branches to make them stand out from each other. Otherwise it's just a kind of black cloud in the shape of a rectangle. It's easy and anyone can do it. This sketch for the print is done with tracing paper stuck into a sketchbook with cellotape. The trick is to draw it backwards.

Then it was a matter of tracing the tracings with an opaque pen onto a kind of translucent film. The opaque ink is red, for some reason. See here:

Another terrible photograph from me, completely unrepresentative of what I'm aiming for, as the four images that'll make up the finished print will need to be carefully registered so that the branches, and the spaces around them will mesh properly, and the trees will recede into a golden mist.
I'll post up some pictures of gold dust screenprinting soon.

OH AND YES

I meant to announce that there will, very soon, be a small online shop selling prints of the paintings Nether, Poor End, Hurt Hill, and Soken Fen. From the 11th November, if all goes to plan.