Dragonfly Collograph Print

Dragonfly Collograph

I've been wanting to experiment with creating collographs for a while using my press, and I decided to make a dragonfly themed collograph as I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with different textures on a watery background.  I've only ever made one collograph before, and certainly not this complicated, so I really was feeling my way with this.  I'm in no way an expert!  But I'm really delighted with how it turned out...

here's a detail of part of the collograph.

Part of Dragonfly Collograph

So here's how I did it:

1.  Laying out the background reeds

I started off by cutting a piece of mount board to size.  I gathered some dried reeds to make the background.  I stuck them to the mount board with lots of Marvin Medium.

2.  Creating the dragonflies

As you can see, I decided to make the dragonflies out of pieces of card, with textured paper for the eyes, and lace fabric for the wings.

3.  Board painted white

Once everything was in place, I coated it with 2 layers of Marvin Medium to make sure everything was stuck down firmly, and then painted it white so I would be able to see the inks better.

4.  Inked up plate

5.  Close up of inked plate

Above you can see the plate once it had been inked up.  I used two colours to ink it up, using oil based inks.  I used a grey ink, which I firmly rubbed into all the details using a scrap cloth.  I then wiped off the excess, and used a blue colour over the plate.  

6.  Inked up paper

Above you can see how this turned out - you can see the layers of grey and blue.  Below, you can see that I  also experimented with using a paint brush to paint in the dragonflies bodies' in pink.  I decided I preferred the simpler blue and grey version.

7.  Inked up paper with pink

So far, pretty unimpressive....but the results are TRANSFORMED when you paint up the inked paper with water soluble inks.  As you can see from the finished print below, the oil based inks show through the water based inks,  The finished print is rich in texture and the colours really sing.  I'm delighted with the detail of the reeds and the wings of the dragonflies.  I'll definitely be experimenting further with collographs!

8.  The finished dragonfly collograph print

If you'd like to buy download versions of this print, have a look at my Etsy shop on:
http://etsy.me/1wVdk8a.