Behind the print: "The Green Door"

Fiona Wallin captures the atmosphere of a charming Greenwich backstreet in her new collagraph print, "The Green Door". She takes us behind the scenes of how she made it, using humble materials to create a wonderful range of tones and textures and a composition you feel you can step right into.

"The Green Door", collagraph by Fiona Wallin

Why did you decide to make this print?

I love London and wandering through its streets, taking in the different buildings and structures, imagining their rich history and observing how they all fit together to make this beautiful urban landscape. When I joined Greenwich Printmakers last year, I spent a morning exploring the local area and found the beautiful little backstreet that I’ve tried to capture in my print. I found the contrast between the charming buildings, the ironwork and the soft trees cascading over the wall entrancing. 

The real-life inspiration for "The Green Door"

What particularly drew you to this door?

Aesthetically, the bright burst of green at the end of the alleyway against the brick and stonework grabbed me straight away. It led me to think about this house and street, and all those similar across London. Who lives there now, and who did before - all the years of different people and communities and all the comings and goings through that door and others like it. I wanted to try and create something atmospheric that would give the viewer that same sense of curiosity about the door and the house that I felt. 

What is a collagraph print? What do you like about this medium?

Collagraph printing is essentially making prints from a collage - a plate created on a board which has been carved into and had textures added to it to make an image when it is inked and printed. I think it’s my favourite type of printmaking, mainly because I just find it so magical what can be created using such humble materials and experimenting with using different surfaces to provide varied tones and textures is so much fun. 

Fiona's drawing on the mountboard. Note that it is mirrored as it will print in reverse

What was your process for making this print?

I absolutely loved making this print. It has so much fine detail and it was so mindful to sit in my studio painting all the tiny brickwork! I started with a base of regular mountboard - I often use this instead of shiny collagraph card as I find it gives me an extra mid-tone to play with. I spent a while cropping and positioning a photograph I’d taken of the street to achieve a composition I was happy with, then created a drawing of the print on the board.

Fiona peeled away the top layer of mountboard to create the darkest areas

I started by making the darkest areas, carving into the board and peeling away the top layer of the card to reveal a fluffy surface that holds lots of ink. I next went in with a carborundum paste and an impasto gel for texture, giving me the softness of the trees around one edge and the speckled effect on a lot of the stone work.

Painting on carborundum paste and impasto gel for texture

Finally I added highlights - including many hours of painting all the tiny bricks - using PVA glue which I tinted with acrylic paint. When the PVA dries it is absorbed into the board and it’s really hard to see where you’ve painted it on, so tinting the glue helps make sure I don’t add too much. I then varnished the plate with a thin layer of shellac to seal everything and it was ready to print!

Using tinted PVA to paint on highlights, including on all the tiny bricks

I printed the plate using the intaglio method of pushing ink into the plate and then wiping the excess away from the surface. I used a tiny piece of chine collé paper to add the green door which is stuck down using nori rice paste (I love the bottle this comes in as it looks like a giant soy sauce!) and handpainted a tiny bit of yellow relief ink around the lights onto the inked plate just before printing. The addition of the relief ink and the green chine collé against the otherwise dark print was not about trying to replicate reality but more about creating a mood and an atmosphere within the print, allowing the door to really stand out and creating that magical, dusk-like mood when night is about to fall and the street lamps first come on. 

Inking up the plate

Were there any particular challenges and things you learned from making this print?

I love working with carborundum on my collagraph plates. It gives such beautiful texture through the way it holds the ink. But I’ve found that after only a few prints it starts to get a bit ‘claggy’ and loses some of its refinement. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to approach colour until I started printing and because of the amount of carborundum I used I didn’t have many chances to figure it out! It also took a bit of experimenting with how to polish the ink  more off the surface of the plate - removing more ink in some areas to give the print depth. I had to learn and experiment quickly to work out my plan for the rest of the small edition.

Fiona Wallin working on a previous collagraph plate

What are you working on at the moment?

I want to bring more colour to my collagraphs and have started a couple of new, large plates that I plan to create as a “jigsaw” - cutting the plate into sections and inking each in a different colour. I’ve not done this before on a large scale and I'm excited to push my practice here to see what I can achieve. 

Fiona's wonderful prints are available in our online shop and in the gallery. For more information, see her artist's page and her Instagram @fiona_wallin_prints.