I Thought I would start the year off with some new year's resolutions.  My resolutions are never really fitness or health orientated.  I have a number of non art related resolutions which I won't go in to too much detail about but includes things such as learning to speak Spanish, completing my course in BASI snowboard instructing and having a few hours paid teaching of this and finally revisit previously learnt programming languages and hopefully learning some new ones.  All of the above are for future job related reasons that may come about or not, but I like to learn anyway. 

But you guys want to know about my art based resolutions, thats why you are here on my website, so I plan to keep it simple,  I teach art and design at a Sixth Form college and paintings take up most of my spare time, ever increasing my portfolio and trying to push my skills, which I can then teach to the students.  This year I have decided to take a step back from painting and concentrate on Print making.

I bought a mangle in the Summer which I began renovating but then Winter happened, funny how that happens... I intended to renovate and convert it in to a printing press.  So over the next few months I will try and get it repainted and working so to concentrate on doing some printmaking at home. 

I do teach printmaking on a Foundation Art and Design course at work, though I will not be teaching this again until October, this gives me time to play and experiment.  I teach a variety of print making techniques including Collagraph (textures and mount board methods), Intaglio (dry point and mirror card), Lino cut (single layer, reduction and key block), Screen printing,  Monotype/print and Gum Arabic Transfer.

I would like to experiment with most of these but in particular Collagraph, as this can have so many varied results (mostly poor, due to lack of experimenting, practice and knowledge of which textures work best).

Of all the print making techniques, Monoprint is definitely my arch nemesis.  I have had little success when transferring line drawings with the ink to the paper without adding unwanted noise.  I need to practice this, which can be done without a press.  I would also like to try Monotype, a print maker I admire for her style and technique is Rebecca Vincent.  Her textures and layering techniques are fabulous and use of colours are stunning and I will to experiment in a similar style

I would also like to experiment more with Lino cut and/or woodcut.  The latter I have not tried yet but I have a few ideas of things to try so watch this space!  I endeavour to be more active in posting on this blog this year as I am pretty bad at doing so in general.