Autumn Gelli Printing

Autumn leaves and their colours always inspire me.  As a result, I've been a bit distracted from my composition lessons by my Gelli plate and the desire to capture some autumn splendour.  

This first one and a few below were done with a favourite stencil called Leaf Specimens by Joggles.  The next few were done with pressed leaves from outside my home.

I find it challenging to achieve the colours (and colour combinations) I'm aiming for.  Some are a bit too bright and garish:

I think the one above and the one below would benefit from some additional embellishment ... maybe with gold and black pens, or dark brown calligraphy ink.

Others are a bit too diminished by the layers or by the addition of too much brown:

The camera also washes them out (or rather, my lack of photographic skills).  😏

Still, I do enjoy playing with colour and the anticipation of how it will all turn out.

And this last one is merely a unplanned nice surprise -- the result of pulling paint from the holes of a stencil (Balzer Designs Pointy Circles)  for the early layers of a few of the prints above.

Happy Autumn!!

Learning Composition: Lesson 2

I've moved on to lesson 2 of Jane Davies' downloadable workshop The Keys to Dynamic Composition: the abstract landscape.  This  is  a very different exercise than lesson  1.  The first photo is the composition midway through:

I'm glad to still be using up bits of my Gelli prints, albeit small bits, most of which got painted over.

The finished version (I think):

I can't say I'm satisfied with it, but that's not really the point.  I'm learning.  Perhaps one of the most important things I'm learning is to tolerate results that are less than satisfying.  While I've always known this is important and that I'll need to do a lot of 'meh' stuff to develop the skills and knowledge to make stuff that is really pleasing to me in its final form, knowing this in the abstract and knowing this in the doing have been distant relatives for me.  This has meant I haven't done a lot of doing!

Importantly, I also found the process enjoyable.  

It feels like it needs something further, but I don't know what that might be.  I'm also not sure about the maroon top; it's possibly too strong and though I tried to knock it back, I didn't want pink.

More to come...