Soft Pastel Drawings

Often I go straight into making a print without having prepared any preliminary drawings. Whilst this is something I wouldn’t encourage students to do, it can allow more spontaneous decision making when confronted with plate, stone or screen. The disadvantage is that you can produce prints that that would clearly benefit from having time spent on their drawings/designs beforehand. Recently I found drawing with soft pastels whilst offering me some interesting marks has also presented itself as a fresh and manageable medium. I am now looking at taking some of these images into screen printing using True Grain film. The images I produced were using limited colours similar to the earlier post for the Aldeburgh Festival exhibition. In this way I can keep the imagery very simple and allow it translate into other mediums.

From now on I am inclined to continue making drawings in advance of any subsequent printing and will expect the resulting prints to take on new values as a result.

There’s a useful information link on True Grain on the John Purcell web page.

http://www.johnpurcell.net/true_grain_Rev.pdf