The Blue Balloon

The image below is of the aquatint process about half way through. The lightest areas are stopped out first and then the plate is dipped in the acid for between 30 seconds and a minute depending on the depth of bite required. Gradually more of the plate is stopped out. This particular plate had 8 separate bites.

Having completed an aquatint of Verity's Blue Balloon story, I have done an initial print so that I can work out how I want the second colour to work.

Alan Furse Quote 2

I typed up the quote in Gill Sans and transferred it onto a piece of A3 lino. It took sometime to cut out the letters, but I was fairly pleased with the result when I did a quick proof onto newsprint.

The two squares will contain images, probably of Alan and William.

Alan Furse Quote

To accompany each image there will be a quote. There are several quotes from Alan Furse's diary in 'Birmingham Pals'. I have chosen Alan's account of the day his brother William died . I have had to paraphrase to limit the word count:

“I gave a little dinner in honour of my birthday .......tremendous gun firing could be heard ........
the great Somme show over 40 miles away.

Little did I know as I celebrated my birthday that my best pal had gone on his long rest, and there was lost the whitest man I ever knew.”

Alan Furse   July 1916
 
His older brother William was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, along with 20,000 others.

Ideally I wanted to use letterpress to reproduce the text. I went to the Parkside print room to look at the typefaces available, but discovered that there weren't enough of any fonts that would have been large enough.

As it is important to me that every technique I use has an element of hand finishing, I will have to consider cutting the text from lino. This will be time consuming and difficult to achieve a good standard, but I will try it out.