A typical Tuesday...

In the holidays that is. Today has involved breakfast at my local surf cafe (Tynemouth Surf Cafe) on the seafront (Great food!!), a wander along the beach before it got horribly busy, a game of frisbee and crucially, some creating! And the day is still young!

 So, I decided to continue with some lino printing, but some other ideas came into my head as I was creating that...

After various sketches, and my love of birds, I decided to focus on an avocet for this one. I'm not actually a bird watcher, I don't know a great deal about birds, I think I simply admire them, I find them beautiful. So wanted to be able to capture some of that.

 I am however not very good at detailed drawings, I tend to lose patience and just assume I'm not going to be very good at it, but to be honest, it's not been something I've really ever focussed on. I like the idea of leaving something to the imagination.

 I love getting lost in a good book, but hate it when the author describes every last little detail to me that nothing is left for my imagination to do, I sort of see my art in that way as well. While I don't want to do any crazy 'abstract' work with some weird and bizarre meaning to it, I do still like bold and simple designs.

So after a few hours yesterday of carving away at my linoleum (and three stab wounds, each to different finger ends!) I ended up with this...

So today allowed me the chance to sort of, decide what I wanted to do with it...I've decided to combine some lino printing with screen printing (I love the texture in the paint you get from screen printing). So after marking my screen out I opted for a bluey background colour with acrylic, so now have several of them sitting on my studio floor drying.

 I'm not sure how many in the blue background to create with this avocet...I think I might just do a limited run of 5 or 6 with this particular colour.

 I do have some new ink on it's way too, so may wait till that arrives to give it a go! 

 Hurry up delivery man...