Thursday, September 01, 2011

Sea Ghosts



As with all things done quickly, errors occur and this was no exception.  However, a crop or two sometimes saves the day.

This is a gyotaku piece of ocean perch printed with Caligo white ink on blue silk kozo paper.  I was pressing the paper to eliminate a few wrinkles and a little smudge of wax must have been left on the iron surface and transferred to the paper.   I muttered a few Anglo Saxon phrases then decided to crop the piece to eliminate the waxed area.  Either that or try to print over it with another fish.  Cropping seemed the easier solution.  I'll add a backing paper to it and keep my fingers crossed  nothing else goes wrong!


The white against the blue is  a good contrast and does give a ghostly appearance to the fish.  I added very light touches of watercolour and coloured pencil to highlight the gill plates and eyes of the fish.

7 comments:

Barbara Philip said...

I really can't see the errors that you mentioned! Both pics look wonderful, the subtle textures are superb!

Lisa Le Quelenec said...

Makes me feel like I'm swimming with the fishies......in a good way not the scary 'Godfather' kind. They've got that underwater light and the textures are fantastic.

olivia said...

Terrific blue fishes !! Love them.

Hedera said...

An interesting process Jeanette. The effect is lovely - textural and a little "underwater" eerie...

RH Carpenter said...

Beautifully done - and I think fixing mistakes is one of the tools you need to have in your kit as an artist, especially fixing them so the viewer never knows there was a mistake :)

Jeanette Jobson said...

Barbara, I cropped this to avoid the mistake. :) Now tomorrow I need to wet mount it and hope I don't kill it entirely :)

I like how the white and blue blend well in this Lisa, giving that underwater effect. Its not perfect, but then nothing is, even fishies.

Merci Olivia!

It really is interesting to do Hedera and these ocean perch are one of my favourites to print. The paper is lovely too, but pricy at around $15 a sheet.

Aren't we all magicians in some way Rhonda? At least when it comes to making the best of what we have.

Christiane Kingsley said...

Having mistakes often leads to better work since it pushes us to use our creativity:-) I really like this piece.