Results of Lithography Weekend Workshop!

This weekend I've been to a Lithography workshop at Leicester Print Workshop, led by Serena Smith. I had a fantastic weekend and learned lots of new techniques. I especially enjoyed working with photo-lithography because it enables me to incorporate a lot of my existing approaches, such as collage, into a new body of work involving the new technique for printing.

Working in stone was also really interesting and lent a very specific texture to the image, which is lovely, but I found the technique to be very labour-intensive. I will definitely use it again in the future, but with my current time constraints I think photo-lithography can really add something extra to my practice and help me to create exhibition-worthy work.

Here are some photos of the work I produced over the weekend (I made lots more, but am going to work over those so that I can develop new ideas and imagery).

My lithography stone! I applied lithography crayon in a variety of ways to the stone to generate the tones you can see here. There are lots of other ways to add tone and texture to the stone, but as time was limited, we only had access to a couple of options. 

Lithography stone (limestone) close-up

'Path of the Derwent', AP1, Stone lithograph on paper. 

A print from the stone. The technique relies on the stone absorbing greasy materials and then holding ink in these areas when the surface is wetted. 

A photo-lithographic image. This was made using one of my photos. 

A selection of other printed images from photo-lithographic plates ( the image on the right shows an overlay of one plate over the other). 

Finding my feet as a Fine Art graduate....

The last year has been a hard one! It is very hard to sustain an artistic practice alongside full-time work and this is coupled with the loss of the University resources that previously sustained my work.

Now, however, I want to begin afresh and experiment with ideas and concepts that may or may not be connected to my previous bodies of work. I think I need to let go of the idea that I definitely need to concentrate in the area I was practising in before- I want to explore a range of media and new ideas. I am going to begin with some prints using found materials around the Central Library in Birmingham. At the moment I'm not sure where this will take me but I hope it will throw up some ideas and inspiration; I am convinced that my practice feeds off experimentation and action rather than theory- I now need to take that leap!

I also want to take my collage practice in another direction- to make collages and explore using these as the basis for paintings and drawings rather than taking them immediately to printmaking.

So here goes...!