As all of the prints I have done so far are black and white, I felt that I needed to work over some of them to incorporate colour to see how they fit in with my other work and since my project involves a lot of colour this was very important. I will be doing some coloured prints once my ink arrives but until then I felt like I should keep my project moving rather than coming to a stand still. As the inks I have used are water based, I couldn’t paint over the prints as this would have caused the paints to combine and create very muddy colours which I do not want. After some consideration I came to the conclusion to try coloured pencils over the top of the prints which worked really well, particularly over the black ink areas. Pastel pencils seemed to work the best and so I decided to go through all of the prints adding colour to them. I kept some of the original prints black and white as a reflection to show my progress and because I feel that the black and white prints are very effective on their own, they just don’t fit in too well with my project as they are.
These are the sheep print manipulations I did using pencils. I was experimenting with different colour combinations and seeing what works the best. I didn’t worry too much about staying in the lines of the original print as the border will be cut off as soon as they are complete. I feel that the prints on the top left and middle left row are the most effective in terms of colour combination (green, oink and yellow & light green, dark green and blue). I feel that this is because they have a big area of contrast while the other colour combinations have colours that are similar tones or similar shades in terms of warmth of coldness. This has really helped me to identify key colour combinations to consider as my project progresses as well as colour combinations that don’t work well.
These are my chicken print manipulations in which I explored different colour combinations. Again, I didn’t feel the need ti stay within the lines as these will be cut down later on. Although I feel that all of the designs are effective, I feel that the colour combinations on the top row are the most effective due to the right tones of each colour being used. There are some positives in the bottom row and I would like to see where I can take the brown shade one. This design made it easy to apply the blocks of colour and rhe pencils add texture/pattern in areas which is interesting. I wonder if I would be able to work over the pieces with another medium but it depends if the pencils I used were too waxy as I used a range of pencils including watercolour pencils, pastel pencils and oil based pencils. I may try this out to see if I can develop them further.
These are the cow manipulations I did. There is a much bigger quantity of these prints as I generated a lot of these prints at the start due to me wanting to experiment with them. I like that I did some prints involving the simplified version of this print, although I with I had done more of them so I could experiment more, I could always photocopy them if it comes to it and then work over them. In my opinion the simple version involving the red on the middle fourth row ( red, orange, yellow, blues and pinks) is the most successful out of the two as I feel that the tones of this all work together nicely yet contrast with the bright yellow and orange. For the more detailed prints, the orange and blue/green and red pieces work really well (first and middle pieces on the third row) as they are simple yet complementary colours so they balance each other out yet attract your eyes. I am happy with the outcome of a lot of these manipulations but some were difficult to work on due to the ink of the print being really thick (first and third on the first row) and so I feel that I should work onto these some more with different mediums to see the outcomes I can achieve.