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| Arctic fox and Aurora, linocut, 9.25" x 12.5" by Ele Willoughby, 2023 |
I always enjoy the #PrinterSolstice series of prompts. I gets me started on my year of printmaking, often trying new things. This year the prompts are all about colour. I am all about colour... but this will be a challenge, as I often carve first, plan colours second. Especially the first two prompts: the absence of colour and tetradic colours.
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| Snowflakes, blind embossed print by Ele Willoughby, 2023 |
I love colour... so the absence of colour is less than obvious for me. I could certainly work in black and white, but I decided to go all out and make a blind embossed print without any ink at all. Using moistened water colour paper, a carved lino block and my etching press, I made a print with the texture of snowflakes.
I had to look up "tetradic colours." It's a colour scheme of four colours equidistant on the colour wheel. People describe it as vibrant or even aggressive. So, that took some planning! I have been thinking of adding to my collection of prints of arctic animals with the aurora. I read about a legend from Finland that the aurora is cause by the "fire fox," a fast running arctic fox whose big busy tail brushes sprays of snowflakes up into the sky. So I loved the idea of a print which straddles the natural history and the folklore collections of prints. The colourful Northern Lights gave me a way of working four colours into a cohesive design.
The rest of the prompts should be easier for me, but I still have a lot of planning and imagining to do. They remaining prints will feature: complementary colours, cool colours, analogous colours, monochromatic colour scheme, split complementary colours, spectrum of colours, CMYK colours, triadic colours, primary colours and warm colours.
