I have been enjoying mixing drawn images with photographic images recently and am particularly pleased with the way two recent images have come out. They are images of the Hindu god, Ganesha, one printed on normal paper and the other on a high quality gold paper.
Stuck at home during lockdown I was thinking about objects that meant something to me. I was given a wooden Balinese Ganesha many years ago as a present when I was working in Bali and I am very attached to,him. So the print started with a drawing of the Ganesha.
I took a photo of the drawing on coloured paper and imported this into photoshop.
I changed everything quite a lot on Photoshop. I added a photo taken at the Indonesian orchid festival at Kew behind the figure and reversed the black limes into white. This leads to an image which is separated into 4 colours, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, to be printed separately.
But when I decided to print the image on gold paper it presented other challenges. To get the colours to sing, I printed the Cyan layer in white first. But I didn’t want to block out all the gold obviously. So I used talcum powder to block out some of the colour particularly in the background as I printed. Plus I didn’t want to use as much black so I changed that layer.
Yvonne Guerrier 