New print “Orchard Harvest”

At the same time I worked on the Seaside Garden print I also sketched the idea for an Orchard at harvest time. I love all things quintessentially English and an apple orchard certainly is that. I was influenced by the start of Peter Greenaway’s film Drowning By Numbers, with all the moths crawling around in the evening around the piles of apples and tin baths. I love drawing trees but wanted to stylise them even more than I have done before.

So I started off with the sketch below.

Initial sketch

I then started working on various elements to decide exactly how I wanted to draw them, such as the apples and trees. Even though I was working on the computer using the drawing tablet, I make marks in a very similar way to linocutting.

Testing out styles

Testing out styles

Once I had played around with the elements I did a rough colour sketch which enables me to decide on areas of colour. Once again this turned into a four colour piece! You can see that overprinting the blue and red gives a lovely purply brown colour ideal for the wood of the shed and apple crates.

Rough colour sketch

Finally I did a detailed high resolution sketch to nail everything down. This is important to me because a lot of the elements are quite graphical and flowing and are not intended to look like they are hand drawn (even though they effectively are).

High resolution final sketch

You can see on the final print (below) that the overprinting of colours worked exceptionally well with the lovely hue of the red overprinting blue on the shed and also the red overprinting green on the apples.

Final print