Wood block printmaking with Merlyn Chesterman Hartley Art and Music Centre.

Today I took some of the studnets from my art classes to a workshop with Merlyn Chesterman RE. Accomplished printmaker and member of print group Pine Feroda. She is a senior fellow at the Royal Society of Printmakers.
She was hugely generous and welcoming. Very quickly making us all feel at ease with this new technique. The wood panels were surprising easy to work with. Much more pleasing than a lino print. We did small test pieces and then were given larger panels to begin a more finished piece. I worked with a painting from my sketchbook of Welcombe Bay. Without thinking started by making the mistake of forgetting the image would reverse in the printing process. However it quickly became clear to me that it would work much better as a two colour print and would be an interesting image even if it was reversed. Merlyn showed me how to produce a second block so I could do this. Printing the first blocks image into paper and then offset printing this onto the second block.
We also worked on a graded colour inking up which I haven’t done before but was so much easier than I thought it would be and very effective.
This was such an enjoyable day. I loved watching my student being taught be someone else. She was impressed with how they worked together and how hard they all worked. I don’t remember to photograph my finished prints and annoyingly damaged them transporting them home. One student produced an amazing large scale print which Merlyn and she inked up together. I remembered to photograph that as it was a rather lovely and slightly dramatic end to the day.