It's pie season

After devouring a delicious blueberry pie with friends, I decided to recycle the pie box and plastic container not into the recycle bin but into collagraph prints.

Looking at the aluminum pie tin I imagined it could be a sunflower head. Perhaps I have sunflowers on the brain. These last few weeks I have been outdoors painting and sketching lots of fields all aglow with brilliant yellow sunflowers. 

Here's some of the materials I used for making my collagraphs.

Here's my collagraph sunflowers I printed in my studio.

Inking table with inks and brayers for rolling up the plates.

For another sunflower print, I use the clear plastic container that housed the pie. I cut out a circular shape to be used as a printing plate. I then scratched deep lines into the plastic surface with a steel stylus, drawing a metal chair in a sunflower patch.

In addition to this plastic plate, other cardboard substrates were inked up and printed together on a press.

Here is the sunflower image inked and printed.

Presently, the fields of sunny sunflowers are fading.  Their large heads heavily laden with seeds are no longer upright turning towards the sun but hang low looking at the ground. The gold finches and other feathered guests are feasting on their nutritious bounty.