New print “Cove”

I’m pleased to share with you this new print in my “Safe Harbours” series called “Cove”. I thought you might like to see the development of the idea.

Last year (in 2018) I was coming up with a lot of ideas for “Safe Harbours” including “Safe Harbour”,”Stone Harbour” and “Tin Mine”. They were me experimenting with the idea of composing a new imaginary scene out of coastal elements I love such as rocks, houses, harbours, flowers and, of course, the sea.

The idea with “Cove” was a couple of houses nestled safely among rocks, with stone steps going all the way down to a secret cove. You can see my original idea below.

Original sketched idea

Once I sketched out the original idea I then did a “colour sketch” which is where I work out the areas of colour, including overprinting, and exactly how many colours I’m going to use. In this case I chose three colours with the cyan and pink overprinting to give a purple. Here’s the colour sketch:

Original colour sketch

Once I had a colour sketch I knew it was going to work, so I then drew everything much more carefully:

Sketch for final illustration

In the final print, I played around a lot with “digital linocutting” which just happens to be how I like to do things. So you can see the rocks, the sky, the stones of the houses, the hedges and the smoke all look a bit like a linocut because that’s exactly how I created them—by cutting away with the brush tool.

I’m really happy with the end result, the colours seem to all work off one another perfectly and the feeling of the houses being nestled above the cove really works for me.

Final print