The Story of Kerkyra

My first ever Print of the Month is ‘Kerkyra’, which is on offer as a Fine Art Giclee Print on watercolour paper with a very handsome 15% Discount, plus FREE Worldwide Shipping! This subscribers-only special offer is available HERE until Sunday 18th March 2018. This beautiful giclée print is available in four sizes, A4 right up to A1. You will need to be a subscriber to get the discount code for this offer. If you don’t already receive my ‘Studio Updates’ newsletter you can sign up for it HERE.

The original of ‘Kerkyra’ began life as a postcard which was sent from Corfu (Kerkyra) way back in 1978 when, coincidentally, I was actually based on the island, working as a Holiday Rep for the season. I was based variously in Paleocastritsa and Benitses and got around that year on a bright orange moped. Subsequently I returned to the Nissaki area several times, where friends were renovating an old house. Anyway… back to the painting… I fell in love with the beautiful postage stamps on this particular card and an added bonus was the fabulous ‘Kerkyra’ date stamp, so I set about collaging over the recipient’s name and address with a strategically placed calendar page and fixing the whole card with a clear acrylic sealant.

Flipping through my army of sketchbooks, I selected a drawing which I felt lent itself to this particular card and the image I had in mind. This drawing of one of the chapels in Koroni Monastery fitted the bill. It was drawn during one of my many visits to the Monastery gardens with my ‘On location’ sketching group. It’s actually the little chapel at the far end of the garden, near the tower without any railings on top! I set about re-scaling the drawing to fit the postcard so that the linework did not interfere with the beautiful postage stamps. You can see I had a bit of trouble with the 1970’s blue ink, which bled slightly when applying the acrylic medium – no doubt because it was written with a fountain pen. The blue smudges added nicely to the texture of the old walls of the chapel!

An acrylic ‘skin’ was then created of my drawing by pasting a black & white laser copy of the original with several coats of a special acrylic medium. This was then soaked in water and the paper carefully and gradually rubbed away to leave a semi-transparent skin with the drawing on. It’s a bit of a complex process which takes some patience and can sometimes result in disaster if the paper is removed too enthusiastically! After adhering the ‘skin’ to the postcard, I started painting the image with my favourite fluid acrylic paints  – gradually building up the thin layers of colour as if it were watercolour.

A little opaque white paint was added on the walls of the chapel before the postcard-painting was mounted in a white passpartout. Here’s the finished ‘Kerkyra’ painting with another sketchbook drawing of the same little chapel, drawn from a slightly different angle. I’ve drawn this scene many times and never tire of it!

‘Kerkyra’ is well travelled – it started life as a postcard published in Greece in the 1970’s, which was then sent to friends in England from someone holidaying in Corfu in 1978. It came back to Greece a couple of years ago when I purchased several vintage cards from an online collector… where I re-purposed it as an altered postcard-painting, adding a little bit of Koroni to the mix.  Finally it was given a new home in England – where it now resides with one of my lovely collectors.

Although the original painting was postcard size, it has been scanned at a very high resolution, which means it can be reproduced at a much larger scale, without any loss of detail. My graphics expert, Mick, does all the clever stuff to turn my originals into prints and he works closely with the printers’ colour specs to achieve a faithful reproduction of the original. An added bonus of blowing a postcard size image up to A4, A3, A2… and even A1, is that suddenly lots of little details become more visible – it’s very exciting! Kerkyra is a popular print and I’m very pleased to be able to offer it with the special Print of the Month discount. Any number of ‘Kerkyra‘ paper prints may be purchased with this offer. PLUS if you order any other paper prints at the same time as the Print of the Month, the whole order qualifies for free shipping (but canvas reproductions or originals must not be in the same order).

All our Fine Art Prints are professionally printed on 315g Cold Press Watercolour Paper with UV (pigment-based) inks containing enhanced light stabilisers using a twelve colour giclée process. The process and materials used are of museum quality and prints carry a 100+year colour guarantee (where prints are not hung in strong direct sunlight). They are carefully packaged and sent to you by recorded delivery in a sturdy mailing tube for you to mount and frame as you prefer. This particular Print of the Month is available in four sizes from a nicely compact A4 to a magnificently large A1. The smaller prints group very nicely with other prints or canvases.

Please Note: This particular offer is for a paper print of Kerkyra and does not apply to the stretched canvas version. Watch out for other special offers coming up in the next months. Do check you’re signed up for my Studio Update emails to receive the special discount codes each month and whitelist gill[at]gilltomlinsonart.com to make sure they don’t go in your Spam/Promotions folders!