Help?

So when we moved to Hebden Bridge in February, I started getting over enthusiastic and leaping on every bandwagon I possibly could in order to make friends/get work/get involved with stuff in the local area.

This included a wild punt at getting a table at this summer's Hebden Bridge print fair (despite not reeeeally being a print maker). Remarkably, they accepted my application, and now I need to become a printmaker before July.

(I make this sound frivolous, but printmaking is genuinely something I've been wanting to get more involved with for a long time, so this is the perfect motivator).

With this in mind, I've booked myself a screenprinting session at The Egg Factory, and that date is now rapidly rushing up at me.

I had this idea that I want to make some beautiful two-colour prints designed to sit either individually or in sets. The cold hearted cynic in my tried to think about what would reliably sell, and the answer I came up with was 'everyone loves nature, right?'

I pondered a bit more about something that wasn't just a pretty drawing of some flowers, and, inspired by my now many many hours of walking the dog in the local area, decided to create a set of three prints titled 'look up', 'look down', and 'look around'. I was almost certainly inspired by the wonderful Cara Courage's 'look up' project, although weirdly the 'look down' idea was what came first to me, because I'd been seeing so much fascinating stuff around my feet as I strolled along.

So I made this set of three illustrations...

Look up...

Look down...

Look around...

But you know what, fun though these were, the city is where my heart will always lie. So I created a companion urban set...

Look up...

Look down...

Look around...

(TBH guys, I like the urban ones loads more)

I wanted to take a fun typographic layered approach (as regular readers of this blog will see a lot in my visual diaries), so the below versions are what I'm planning on printing (probably in roughly these colours, although I'll see what free leftover inks the Egg Factory have got knocking around when I'm in!)

So... I enjoy the typography, but do you guys like it? I wonder if they're better without and I should just do them as single colour screenprints but that seems kind of boring? I love the way layered inks interact, and the transparency colour mixes that are created, so I'd really like to go in for two colour versions if possible.

Another possibility is to sit the urban and rural side by side, like so...

Or perhaps the three views together (this would be a three colour screenprint which would be more work but maybe that's fine)

I'd genuinely like your thoughts. Do you even like these at all? Would you hang them on your wall? Which version do you prefer? For the versions without the text, I'd still have the title written very small in the bottom corner along with my signature and edition number, so the meaning wouldn't be totally lost, it would just be less overt. I'm incresingly thinking I really like those three colour ones, but I'd have to charge more for them, and they'd be a bit bigger, so maybe not as sellable...?

Although my colour choices are limited to an extent by what the Egg Factory have in stock, are there any rough colour combos you'd like to see?

Is there anything else fun I could do with these drawings in a screenprinting context that I've not thought of?

Basically I've got my screenprinting session booked in for this Thursday and I've got THE FEAR because I'll be spending a reasonable amount of money on studio time and paper and ink, and I don't want to get it totally wrong and make something that no one is interested in.

(Other pre-July projects I need to get onto include a new riso zine in collaboration with my friend Harriet, some kind of screenprinted tote bag because I love tote bags, and also just generally digging through my archives to see what past pieces might work well resurrected as a riso or screen print poster. Oh and I'd love to do some lino cutting if I get time but that MAY be over ambitious...)