Sometimes I wish I could insert images into a post in bulk. I still can’t believe there’s no facility for it in WordPress. I went searching for one again, and instead I found the gallery option:

Not quite what I had in mind, but it will do for this post.

This little project came about because I had bought two rolls of newsprint sheets for warm up sketches in life drawing classes, only to find the surface so slippery that charcoal wouldn’t stick. Testing other kinds of paper, I’ve found that heavy duty newsprint has a softer surface that doesn’t resist charcoal, and multi-purpose paper is even nicer cheap paper to work on (and more likely to suit purposes other than life drawing). I’m also using the brown paper that I bought from Reverse Art Truck.

But what to do with the first batch of newsprint? I could use it to cover a work surface when painting, but I prefer to make use of actual newspaper for that. While experimenting with intaglio printing I separated the tools and such for relief printing into their own storage box, and as I did I thought about the extra water based ink colours I’d bought and what else I could use them for.

The two excess craft materials came together in my head, and I had the answer: wrapping paper! I don’t have a lot of the commercial sort, and tend to keep it for craft projects.

In the first pic you can see the homemade stamps, ink, roller and spatula I used for the printing. Most of the stamps were the ones I cut from a foam pet bowl mat. I also tried stamps made from washers, and plastic ones I’d bought from the craft store.

I started with the heart stamps, keeping to one colour, and decided to make two sheets of each pattern where possible or, in the case of the heart outlines, two that matched.

The leaves were the first multi-colour pattern, followed by the stars, in which I tried using gold acrylic paint for the mid-sized ones (but it was a bit thin for this sort of printing) and the fish and waves (with the washer stamp used for the bubbles).

The green and yellow one with stripes wasn’t so successful. The yellow stripes used the plastic shop-bought stamp, and it didn’t take to the ink very well. I suspect it’s better suited to stamp pads than this sort of printing.

At this point I tried a few other things: dripping paint on and then squishing two sheets together (and then adding blue circles using the lid of a bottle; using the roller to apply paint. My favourite is the orange ‘ombre’ one, in which I used up an old tube of orange acrylic paint by ‘inking’ up the roller, then rolling always in one direction, starting from the right.

The last photo is of the laser printed pages I rolled the excess ink and paint off onto. I still love the way these look. One of these days I’m going to work out a way to turn them into something.