getting messy

during the great photograph purge I wrote of in my last blog post I realized there were a few that I'd been meaning to print s0 I could work with them in collage etc. 

 this week I decided to get that done

most of the prints I wanted were of the river, along with a few of the boards and windows of the Klondike paddlewheeler

as I printed them I realized they all worked rather well together... similar in colour but a good variety of textures and styles so I gathered a few others I had printed a while back: driftwood, more of the water and of the boat

I had collage on my mind but not only with photographs - I had a quick look at my handmade papers but none worked and so I decided it was time to do some gelli-printing

after a day of choosing and prepping a variety of papers and getting things all set up I began yesterday morning

it's been many years since I've worked with gelli-printing and the first day's work was pretty ho-hum but today I tried again with better results

(I have come to accept that in almost everything I do the first is the worst and once that's out of the way things generally improve fairly quickly)

for inspiration I looked at a piece I had painted with ink a while back... it has the right blue-grey with lots of highlights

sparkling water

better... yesterday's renditions were quite black, today I worked hard at getting the blue-black of the winter river; the discard pile was still rather high but each print got a little better than the last, a little closer to what I've been after

and so, a nice collection of prints and photos to work with 

tomorrow is the fun part

cutting and tearing

and glue!

it's one mess after another here these days but each is better than the last

happy days...

take care,

Jillayne