FLOWER STUDIES

After deciding that I wanted each of my designs to include a natural element, including flora and other natural elements such as toadstools and leaves, I thought I should begin to experiment different ways that I could create the images including the use of different line qualities and mark making techniques. 

• I'm interested to see how the different marks and line qualities will come out in the printing methods, particularly within screen printing. Screenprinting is a often a very flat print method so I'm intrigued to find out how my marks and lines that I frequently tend to use in my work will transfer to that method.
• I would also like to go back to mono printing and monotype as a method of creating floral imagery, I think this would be really interesting in terms of transferring my skills onto different ways of image creating.

Before any print making I decided to illustrate floral images from different nature encyclopaedias that I took out from the library. I found this method of repeatedly drawing these images really helpful in developing my way of creating images in a way that isn't too exact and simple. Although a basic medium, I used a felt tip pen in order to get different line qualities in a quick, simple and effective way as opposed to overthinking the marks that I was making.

Following on from this I used tracing paper and went over the different line qualities in order to scan them in and begin to work with them for my positives in screen print.

I'm really excited to learn how different marks look when screen printing and also how the more detailed floral images work alongside the more simple larger images that I have been working with a lot such as the baby and female bods.

I really like how these scans of all of my floral drawings turned out. Despite slightly unrelated to my printing, I think the collage of drawings looks really effective all together. I did quick experiments with different backgrounds and words to see how they would look as design images.

Perhaps I could work with images and colours like this in the future, i really like the handmade grainy feel that scanning tracing paper produces and it's something that I'd like to explore within my image making. 

NEXT STEPS

• My next steps are to begin designing for my printing, first of all for the screen print workshop and hopefully, follow on from that for the final designs.
• I'm really happy with how these flower explorations have turned out and I feel like they're going to be really successful when coming round to creating my prints!