What I really love to do - making art - has been a bit squeezed by this busy festive season (being a one man band certainly keeps me on my toes) so it has been wonderful to start work recently on a print that I've wanted to make for some time - forget me nots.
I've been working on making the stencils today - if you're interested in seeing the process I go through to make a print then this one's for you!
I've made several drawings of forget me nots over the last few years - I love these delicate little flowers. They're not just pretty, but steeped in symbolism, and I think they mean something a little different to everyone who loves them.
When I come to make a print of a drawing I like to be as true to the original drawing as possible, but with these, either I had to use one little sprig or adapt a larger drawing so I had to be a little creative.
Once I have my image mapped out, the next stage is making a master drawing. I trace around the pencil drawing in a thicker pen - the thickness of the pen line will become the white line in the final print and I like to try and keep this the same in each print.
From this master drawing I then use a light box to trace around each colour individually onto the stencil paper. So for this print I will have a pale blue background, then a darker blue for the flower, some green and a bit of yellow - four stencils. So I will trace around all the pale blue bits to make that stencil, all the dark blue bits, all the yellow and all the green separately.
Then I cut them out by hand with a precision cutting tool - it's a lot of fun. I love this stage of the process - I can start to see how the final print will look, and the hand cut element gives the print the clean sharp edges to each block of colour that I love.
If you'd like to see a little time lapse video of me cutting these out then head over to Instagram and see today's Reel, https://www.instagram.com/charlotte.noar/
I need quite a chunk of uninterrupted time to start making an actual print, so it won't be in the immediate future, but hopefully sometime over Christmas. Watch this space and I'll post the progress on this one!
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