River and hills: Experimenting with an old collagraph cut off

River and Hills, 14x 4 inches, collagraph and cp, Vivien Blackburn


details to see the texture:

I came across this 14x4 inch collagraph in the 'do-something-with-this-later' drawer. I think it was an offcut from a larger collagraph plate, cropped before it was printed and then printed with the same inks that I'd been using (green and yellow), just to see what happened.

It had originally been vertical and part of a seahorses/underwater series of printmaking. Looking at it horizontally I saw a landscape with a river winding through.

Using coloured pencils I worked on it in warm rosy hues to contrast with the cooler green. I want to darken and cool with deep blue the area around the right hand tree a little before I'll call it finished I think. What do you think?

Coloured pencil works really well over collagraphs as it gels with the graininess of the print - which I'm pretty sure was on Fabriano Rosapina paper, which has a nice velvety feel adding to the grain. I've never been happy with the results if I've used watercolour or oil over them because of the sharp difference - the way it fills in the grain unlike the printed surface.

After working a bit too tightly sometimes recently :>(, it was very freeing to simply play with an image, pulling the landscape from the abstract shapes.

If you are interested you can see other collagraphs and the process here