'Heritage' is my chosen topic, in this case a building. This is Mildenhall Warren Lodge, maintained by the Friends of Thetford Forest Park. It is one of just two such mediaeval warreners' buildings of it's type still standing the Breckland district of Norfolk and Suffolk. The other is Thetford Warren Lodge, maintained by Heritage England (formerly English Heritage). A third warrener's lodge, Ickburgh, stands a ruin, just one corner remains, under the care of the Forestry Commission. Warrening is a form of rabbit farming popular in mediaeval times.
The base of the image is a very simple screen-print, whereby the building has been broken down into basic geomatric shapes, laid down as a stencil made from cut newspaper in such way that the the ink drawn through the screen lays down a colour for the background, leaving negative empty shapes. As you pull the ink across the screen, it also sticks the stencil to the screen, ready for the next print. I chose simple green and blue to represent grass and sky. Nothing too challenging!
After a few prints have been made it is essential to wash the screen thoroughly to prevent the acrylic inks from drying and clogging the fine mesh, so ruining the scree and preventing future use. If you are doing a long print run, you may still have to wash the screen periodically to prevent permanent damage to the screen from dried ink. This would then require a fresh stencil to be made.
By not thoroughly mixing the colours (or by moving one colour through another) it is possible to create a marbling effect with the printed areas. Also, by dropping clear medium directly onto the screen it is possible to block some colour, giving irregular lighter patches for additional texture, too.
A textured material has also been used to give a pattern the the roof, in this print.
Once a number of prints have been made, enough to experiment with, the fun begins! Each image has the details of the warrener's lodge added in a different way.
The first uses the same acrylic paint (without printing medium) to paint in some detail...
The second uses nothing more complicated than pen & ink... (and a texture print for the roof). Artist quality pens with different shade of grey to black ink, and with different size nibs, fine-tip to broad-brush, have been used.
The third in this series, so far, is a little more interesting! Here, I used textured materials to fill in some colour to the surfaces of the building (the negative, geometric spaces), and then cut out coloured papers in the rough shapes of the architectural details and glued them to the surface. The resultant image has a 'naive-art' quality which is rather appealing..!
The large grey panels represent the remains of a render applied to the walls when a lean-to extension was added in the later use of the building, before falling derelict. A low wall, the remains of another lean-to extension, are also added with cut coloured papers. A filled-in Victorian window is also visible made of red brick. The mediaeval walls are of flint and rubble construction.
The roof is brand new, built in May 2012, made from red pan tiles and timbers taken from the Forestry Commission estate nearby. It was designed to be similar the last roof on the building, historically, as seen in old archived black & white photograph of the 1930s. It will help preserve the ancient building into the future.
The story of restoration project can be followed here: http://www.fotf.org.uk/content/micro_sites/fotf_projects/fotf_projects_mildenhall_warren.shtml
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