Urban Landscape

Well, not the stereotypical Hong Kong skyline or the neon-lit streets, but this photo was snapped in the busy town of Sai Kung. It seemed to say a lot about the HK infrastructure.

The photoshopped version on the right could be a nice screenprint.

 

In fact I decided to use relief printing here as well as monoprinting, quite simply lino cut into strips with carvings on them to create a higgledy piggledy grid. The other technique used here is printing on the back of the semi-transparent paper to get a lighter print. I kept to the colour scheme of the photo, using red and black ink, but because of using both sides of the paper, get grey and light red too.

Again, I’ll just document the various prints:

I started with simple markmaking, using corrugated cardboard, which looks pretty representational of grey corrugated iron too:

 

Then started playing around with the horizontals and verticals of doors and windows, building numbers, bars, printing on both sides of the semi-transparent paper, and backdrawing in a contrasting colour.

 

I then decided to cut strips of lino, making assorted marks on them (aircons, letter boxes, pipes, windows, door frames, door numbers) which could be arranged in different colours and densities, to suggest the erratic grids of the buildings. Some were cut with lino-cutting tools, some carved with scissors, scrubbed with sandpaper.

 

I  then made a collograph with corrugated card, plastic ties and mesh, and cut number shapes, keyholes, and stamped with cut-out wooden letters and numbers:

 

More experiments with panels:

 

 

The one I liked best was the grid patterns printed on the back of the paper, then over stamped with numbers on the front:

This kind of image is easy, as it involves stamping only, little in the way of registration. Like the places it is inspired by.

Overall though, these exercises are perhaps too much a matter of transposing images, patterns and motifs a bit too literally, so I think I’d like to get back to more abstract ideas and more organic shapes and patterns.