'Tulip Series' - screen-prints
The ‘Tulip 1’ (2008) screen-print is based on an aerial photograph I found which was taken looking down over the bright and colourful tulip fields in Holland
There was almost an abstract feel to the image with the crisp organized rows of tulips lined up next to each other and the many vibrant colours in the image and this was what I wanted to translate in to my screen-prints.
The image I found was used for the basic structure of the screen print. Using illustrator I broke the image in the separate layers for each colour that I wanted to print. In all there are 7 layers to the tulip1 image with 6 colours being used with 1 final detail being layered over the top.
As with all my screen-prints I enjoy printing various arrangements of color and the tulip image offered me an opportunity to be very experimental and try many bright and vibrant combinations. Altogether I printed 25 variations of colour.
After the initial success of the first tulip image I decided that I would make a small series based on the theme tulip. The second image called ‘tulip 2’ (2010) was again drawn on illustrator but only contained 5 layers. Four layers were for colour with the fifth being for the detail. One of the problems I had when printing the first tulip image was the disjointedness of the colours. One of the ways I tried to get around this was printing less colours but designing the layers to overlap each other in more areas. This way I hoped that by being more selective with the colours I used I would be able to overlay layers to ‘mix’ colours as I printed, so therefore giving the impression of 6 or 7 colours in the image even though only 4 main colours would be used.
I found that this method not only improved the quality of the colours in the image, but also the quality of the finished print as the layers lined up more accurately and the overlapped areas reduced the amount of white gaps in the image that sometimes appear due to mis-registration.
Altogether, I printed 20 variations of tulip 2
There was almost an abstract feel to the image with the crisp organized rows of tulips lined up next to each other and the many vibrant colours in the image and this was what I wanted to translate in to my screen-prints.
The image I found was used for the basic structure of the screen print. Using illustrator I broke the image in the separate layers for each colour that I wanted to print. In all there are 7 layers to the tulip1 image with 6 colours being used with 1 final detail being layered over the top.
As with all my screen-prints I enjoy printing various arrangements of color and the tulip image offered me an opportunity to be very experimental and try many bright and vibrant combinations. Altogether I printed 25 variations of colour.
After the initial success of the first tulip image I decided that I would make a small series based on the theme tulip. The second image called ‘tulip 2’ (2010) was again drawn on illustrator but only contained 5 layers. Four layers were for colour with the fifth being for the detail. One of the problems I had when printing the first tulip image was the disjointedness of the colours. One of the ways I tried to get around this was printing less colours but designing the layers to overlap each other in more areas. This way I hoped that by being more selective with the colours I used I would be able to overlay layers to ‘mix’ colours as I printed, so therefore giving the impression of 6 or 7 colours in the image even though only 4 main colours would be used.
I found that this method not only improved the quality of the colours in the image, but also the quality of the finished print as the layers lined up more accurately and the overlapped areas reduced the amount of white gaps in the image that sometimes appear due to mis-registration.
Altogether, I printed 20 variations of tulip 2