Thursday 27 June 2013

A Staithes like fishing village screen print... finished finally!

It's been a drawn out gestation for this screen print design (version one, version two) but at long last I've got something that captured the flavour of the fishing village that inspired me. It's been a personal project I've picked up and put down many times over the last few months but I'm glad I didn't give up on it.

The print has ended up being in three colours as I just couldn't make things work compositionally with two screens and a third mix colour. That being said, as usually happens when I play about with multiple mixed colours, I do like aspects of the design in just two of the three screens. That's the bonus I find in designing screen prints, you get two or more colour designs for the price of one.

I've worked in a different manner on this compared with other screen print designs I've done. Whereas I'd usually sketch straight into photoshop with the wacom tablet the majority of this is composed of loads and loads of scanned in, very quickly generated ink, paint and pencil elements. Actually compositing in photoshop took a great deal of time though with so many elements to assemble. I've actually surprised myself with the looseness of the final illustration and the balance of stylised and more naturalistic elements. There's so much detail and texture in there that I have my doubts on capturing everything in the screens but the looseness will, hopefully, be more forgiving of happenstance accidents in the printing process as a whole.

Now on with other less seagully things!

5 comments:

salli s. swindell said...

it's so great to see the limited color versions...love the images and styling of the houses and such. i just really love your work ; )

Phil Toodle said...

This is a thing of beauty, I can't wait to see the finished print 'in the flesh'.

Anonymous said...

Matt this is exceptionally exceptional. Im with Phil -cannot wait to see the finished print.

Kriszti said...

I've come across this picture somewhere on the internet, then spent half an hour to find your blog. Now it's been hours I'm just sitting in front of my monitor and staring at your works... amazing... just "my type of stuff".

karumina said...

Great!