I had originally thought to create a print based on objects I found within the Herbert gallery using painting on the plate and back drawing. But I chose to base the print on a pair of shoes I found, and thought their shape would be simple enough to make an effective two coloured mask.
You can see above my original design based on the shoes, I thought it could work well to have all the shoes in the corners. However I encountered a few problems with the design.
As you can see the mask hasn’t come through on the print in great detail. The marks look like scary faces rather than shoes.
I tried another larger version to see if this improved the print quality. It didn’t initially, here’s a ghost print of the second mask.I tried to improve this by back drawing but didn’t give myself much help with where I needed to carry out the back drawing to enable it to look more like shoes.
I then tried a larger mask with the shoes facing the same way (downwards) to see if this would help.
As a mask it still looks like odd faces, but I had in mind that when I did the blue mask of the background I could back draw to add in the buckles to give it a much more shoe like quality.
I think this worked fairly successfully, you can see the finished print below..