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.

Children’s Shoes 1800’s

Initial Shoe 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.

Print from original mask

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.

Third mask

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..

Final Children’s shoe print