College has finished for the term and I’m looking forward to getting into lots of festive activities in the run up to Christmas now. We spent most of the second half of the term doing various types of printing so I thought I’d do a round up of what we covered. To finish off the term we had an exhibition in one of the smaller galleries at the college displaying the work we’d made over the course of this first term entitled ‘Tests and Samples’. At the beginning of the term I decided that my original pieces reminded me of textures on the water and I have carried that theme across all of my work, repeating the same motifs and colours where possible to give all my work a cohesive look.

We kicked off after half term with mono-printing. I’ve had one go at this before, but couldn’t really remember what to do, so I was pleased that our tutor Jo gave us a very in-depth demonstration! She had lots of different tools that we could use to create marks and textures on the paper, and we also used cut-out stencils to mask sections of the work and overprint on top.

The following week Jo was away, but Debby Brown was our substitute teacher. Debby has been teaching at Morley College for years and has a huge amount of knowledge about textiles. She will be the tutor for next term as well. With Debby we played around with creating textures in paper by creasing and crinkling the paper and then ironing on interfacing to give it strength. I later sewed into the pieces I had made, and these turned out to be my favourite things I made this term.

My second favourite thing was a quick project we did one week making slides from scraps of materials. Seeing these enlarged in the projector was amazing! You would never guess that such interesting images could come out of these little slides and the effect of the glue was fantastic! I think there could be a lot of development with these images using digital manipulation and it would be interesting to see what could be done with them.

Next, we moved onto collograph printing and Chine collé – two processes that combine collage and printing to produce images using ink and paper to create layers, colours, and textures. These processes were quite technical, and we used a printing press to achieve the right amount of pressure needed to get a clear print. I liked one of the blocks I made, but not the other so I cut it up and tried rearranging the pieces to create different images.

The last two weeks we spent making stamps; using simple shapes to make interesting prints through repetition, pattern, and rotation. We also used the stamps to create tags for our work that was going into the exhibition so it could be identified. I really enjoyed these two weeks. The creation of the stamps was very satisfying and then the actual printing felt quite mindful.

This term has been quite a whistle stop tour of various techniques. Although we have mainly worked in paper, the majority of the techniques could be applied to textiles going forward and as always, I like building up my bank of techniques and knowledge because you never know when they may come in handy for a future project! I’m looking forward to seeing what we get up to next term.