New Print "Between Tides"

Boats have featured in quite a few of my prints, like Seaside Garden and Rock Stack. Still, they have never been the main feature, so when my dad suggested I make a fishing boats print, it seemed the perfect opportunity to develop my love of these unique boats in a specific print.
I love drawing the overlapped planks and their textures, and I wanted to feature this heavily in the print, so having a group sitting within the harbour walls at low tide seemed perfect.
The inspiration for this harbour came from visiting Mousehole in Cornwall about three years ago.

Setting the print at low tide opened up many other textural elements, including the wall of the harbour and the lobster pots.
I started with a rough sketch, and the wall texture began to develop there, with different textures and sizes of stone making up the wall.
From the initial sketch, I started to think about the composition and elements within the design and created a more detailed illustration, including the ladder coming down to the bottom.

I wanted to create lots of interest in the harbour wall and the hulls of the boats, and to do this is became apparent that I was going to use more colours, and soon this print became the first I created using five colours.
I used a yellow texture over the brown to give a rough feel and developed the other colours to vary the surface of the stones making up the wall and the wooden boats.

With a print so full of colour and texture, I had to ensure that it felt balanced, and the harbour bed allowed me to do that with the gritty texture and colours I used. The gull helps balance it too and leads your eye through the print, from his position to the ladder.
I used the translucent black ink to give me a darker colour of every colour and, most importantly, provide a shadow from all the objects in the scene.

Printing Between Tides proved to be the most demanding screen print I've printed because of the need for tight registration on all the colours. I used some trapping to help me, but I still ended up with quite a few which were not perfect. It is hard to know sometimes when I need to stop and put something down. Screenprinting is an art form, and art always has imperfections, and you need to accept those, as they are part of what gives you your look and feel.

In the end, I was so happy with the finished print. It all came together nicely and worked as a scene. I love the realism combined with the stylised lines and textures, from the sand to the boat hulls, it captures what I wanted to achieve in this print.