Woodcut Parakeet Experiment

For years, I've wanted to produce a printed image of parakeets that captures their noisy, cheerful nature.  They have been very successful in spreading to many urban areas, and there are ring necked parakeets screeching all across the south of England, and are especially prevalent in London, and some have now even settled in Edinburgh.  There are large populations in Madrid and Barcelona, and I really enjoyed hearing them squabbling in the palm trees in these beautiful cities when we have been on holiday there.

Many years ago, I did a linocut of parakeets with collograph cherry blossom.  I liked the way the blossom turned out, but something was missing from the parakeets.  When we got home from Madrid recently, after seeing a large population in the beautiful university suburb of Alcala de Henares, I was inspired to try again.  Initially I did a linocut design - you can see the experiment in black - but although I was happy with the posture and shape of the bird, I still felt something was missing.  

I translated the shape of the bird into a vector image in Inkscape.  I had a zig zag fabric pattern in mind, so the parakeet is sitting on a diagonal line.  I had simple pink flowers in the background to represent cherry blossom.  I wanted the parakeet mostly green, and the flowers pink and white.  The background is made up of these two ink colours - pink ink first, green ink second.  I wanted some of the details of the parakeet - such as the eye, mouth and collar markings - to be made up of this darker colour which is produced when you print green over pink ink.  You can see here the two separate woodcuts which I cut out using a laser cutter - one for green ink, one for pink.  The images do not make any sense when you see them separately! In the end, with the exception of the mouth, the details did not work in the darker colour - but the background really works.

The digital image looks so flat and boring in comparison to the printed wood cut.  It's like magic the way that printing an image in ink onto a tangible piece of paper just transforms it.  There is such a richness to the colour.  The way the wood grain allows some of underlying opaque pink to be seen through through the overlay of the more transparent green ink brings a 3D quality.  This is why, although I feel digital art has its place, it will never replace the creation of hand made images produced through the application of pigment to paper.  Although I'm still not completely happy with the design, it has been successful as a proof of concept - and the little woodcut images made perfect thank you cards!