Nine Patch Prints

I have been meaning to get around to doing something with this project I started a while ago, but as usual, other, more exciting things, have gotten in the way. Towards the end of last year, I wrote a blog post about The Art of Stress Management, where I talked about a project I’d been working on which was easy, simple and straightforward and allowed me to be creative, but without the pressure of creating. It was supposed to be a daily project, but I ended up getting back into the swing of creating and so left it behind. However, some of the pictures I made while I was doing it really stuck out to me as something that I could develop further. I liked the lines and patterns that were created in the images and wanted to translate them into my own work. My initial intention was to try and make lino cut prints with them, but I had some foam lying around and decided that it would be a good opportunity to try a different type of printmaking that I hadn’t done before.

My first step was to choose one of the images from my sketchbook that I liked. I then traced the squares to simplify them into basic shapes. I cut those shapes out of foam and stuck them onto mount board to make stamps. I layered up the stamps using stamping inks.

I liked this effect, but other images had interesting lines in that I wanted to try and incorporate. I test out carving into the foam with my lino cutting tools to see how successful that was. It didn’t completely remove the foam liked I’d hoped it would, but it did compress the foam down to create the lines, which worked pretty well for what I wanted.

I did the same technique as before: layering up the stamps on top of each other. This time I wasn’t trying so hard to recreate a particular image and just wanted to see how well they worked together. I used a mixture of my two stamp types: the block shapes and carved stamps to create this effect, which I really like.

Some of the ink pads I used were a little tricky to ink up my stamps with, which is why some of the colours haven’t printed as cleanly as others. I might make some more of these and either mount them into aperture cards or just have them as mounted prints. Either way, I’m really happy with how these turned out and the possibilities of what I can do with them.