POOP DECK PRINTS part 2

As you may have read last week Andrew Morrison and myself were busy preparing a new body of work to go on show/sale in the Peerie Shop Cafe, Lerwick. After a busy weekend of printing we produced a set of limited edition screenprints to coincide with The Tall Ships Races, Lerwick 2011. This is the first exhibition we've put together as Last Night, our Co:Lab side project.



The Tall Ships have now been and gone, and with them brought lots of celebration, events and most of all visitors, the town was buzzing with people and activity over the festival and with so much on, a much needed pit stop in The Peerie Shop Cafe for a cup of coffee and fresh local food alongside our new screenprints was a must... if you could get in the door...

If you missed them over the festival, we're happy to let you know they are still on show until Monday 1 August.

Jono's technique and process
With the agreement of a loose theme for the exhibition, I wanted to explore some more techniques using the same method I've used for the past few screenprints, using cut paper as original artwork for the stencil.

What I'm trying to achieve is to get some interesting effects with the loose brushed texture and the fine delicate cuts of the paper and do this over multiple layers of print. To get into the project I start with the textures, this is very enjoyable and messy, producing around 10 sheets of textured paper with different styles, thick brushed paint, watered down paint, dripped on paint and mono printed from glass solids.

These are then left to dry and I can begin on the next step of rough penciling onto the back, but sometimes front of the painted paper. At this point I will have done a loose sketch and have an idea about colours and how I'd like the final print to look (Note: what you see here isn't what I originally intended). I get the blade and cutting mat out and begin cutting the artwork into the textured paper.

My mind instantly switches on to cut mode and I start to imagine the rough outlines I've penciled, cut out. This is when I have to think on my feet and be a couple of steps ahead of myself, otherwise I'll make a wrong cut and part of the image will fall out. Things change, sometimes dramatically, I start to become more freestyle with the knife. Cutting, although fun, is very time consuming and the more intricate, the more hypnotic.

These cut layers are scanned and output to film for exposing to the screen. The next experiment I want to do is to paint and cut directly to film to miss out the printing to film step, which we always have found to be where problems arise. (ie forgetting to order more acetate with a deadline, size of acetate, printers melting film AAARGH!) We always found a way around but I want to miss that step out.

As I mentioned I had a good idea in my head how I wanted the prints to look like. Another part of the process I need to learn to accept is seeing the final results are completely different from the initial idea.