Leftovers III Exchange @WingtipPress

Time for this year's edition of Leftovers at Wingtip Press in Boise, ID.

LEFTOVERS III 

Prints: 14 (you'll get 12 in return, we keep one for exhibitions and one to raise funds for those who need our leftovers)
Size: Up to 5" x 7" - can be smaller, but NO larger please!
Cost: $12.00
Due Date: March 15, 2012
Ship to: Wingtip Press 6940 Butte Court Boise, ID 83704 USA

Contact Wingtip Press if you want to participate.

Leftovers Print Exchange

Do you have lots of bits and pieces of paper kicking around from various editions? How about old blocks or plates that would combine in an interesting new way? Or do you have leftover prints lying around that you could funk up a bit? Well, then, step right up for the second annual Leftovers Print Exchange! Delivery deadline is March 15, 2011. Join the over 124 (!) participants from around the world and get your special printers' dozen in the mail.

Details
Prints: 14 (twelve for the exchange, one for the exhibition, one for donation to raise funds for a local charity)
Process: That's up to you! (No inkjet though, please)
Size: Up to 5" x 7" - can be smaller, but NO larger please!
Cost: $12.00
Due Date: March 15, 2011

Please advise by return email [amyen at mac dot com] if you wish to participate.

And please invite other printmakers to join us!

Wet Canvas Exchange - Printmakers Gone Wild

I've known about this exchange for months. For months, I've been busy at work, and hoping that I'll get some time (and energy) free for this. Then I got my dizzy spells back again last month and that put a stop to anything remotely creative. Finally, finally, I was able to sit down and consider some options. I started with one image, and while I liked the idea, the execution was far to abstract to be even remotely recognizable. I don't mind abstract, but I wanted it to be a bit more obvious. Next idea was lovely, started work on that, then realized I just did not have time for a four colour reduction in a minimum of 20 edition. So, now what?

Flipping through my photos, I came across one that I thought might work. And it did, rather nicely, I feel.

Oyama
Technique: relief print
MDF carved with Dremel
Media: Daniel Smith w/s relief ink
(carbazole violet, phthalo blue, burnt umber, carbon black, permanent red)
Dimensions: approximately 9"x6"
Edition: 28
Year: 2009

The problem with a blend or rainbow roll is that it works so much better when your roller/brayer is the same dimension as the print. Mine, even my beautiful new one from Takach, is not. So the colours were applied:

1. Darkest blue with a little brayer
2. Darkest blue to lighter blue with the Takach
3. Lighter blue to pinkish with another smaller brayer

Most of the edition are remarkably good; a few have a couple of solid horizontals that I'm not 100% pleased with. There's also a bit of a porous spot in the MDF which sometimes came through a little bit lighter than I'd prefer, but it actually didn't detract from the image, and added to the blend remarkably well, I thought.

Next time, I'll try sealing the MDF first with something like primer, to see how that goes. That's what people have been telling me, and everyone seems so astonished that I don't seal the MDF first. Generally, it's not been a problem, but once in a while...

Anyway, off to the post office to ship this off!! Hopefully it'll get there in good enough time to not be too horribly late!

Artist of the Month

Four Oceans Press has selected me to be their Artist of the Month for April, 2009! I'm very honoured, thank you for that! The two works featured are (click on the links on the titles of the works to see their progress & development):


Xocoatl from the Food Alphabet Exchange, summer 2008


Queen of... from the Fruit Alphabet Exchange, winter 2008

Wet Canvas! Printmaking Holiday Exchange 2008

Well, I finally managed to get my collective together and have put together the slide show for the Wet Canvas! Printmaking holiday exchange.

Thanks to everyone who participated! It was a fantastic (as usual!) exchange.

Fruit Alphabet Exchange Spoiler - Part 3

I have finished the last two colours on the print! They look pretty darned good, but were a little tricky to do simultaneously. Worth the fiddling, though, because now it's done!!

Keeping with the lighter colours that I'd started with printing (rather than the bold ones from the original design), I did a light, spring green and a slightly light orange-red.



Rolling up the two colours was mostly easy, with a few places I had to be very careful where the brayer went on the block. The final little dot of red on the tip of the crown was added by just dipping my fingertip into the rolled out ink on the slab and dabbing it onto the block at the end of the roll up.

The alignment continued to work really well for this print; most of what I printed are worth keeping from an alignment perspective (a nice change from my last exchange print for Four Oceans Press!). You can see on this photo that there's a lot of "noise" on the block: areas which are proud enough to catch the ink from the brayer.


When hand-burnishing, this can be very challenging to avoid and/or clean up. When printing with the block placed first onto the press bed, then the paper on top, the "noise" can get picked up as the press somewhat shoves the paper into the recesses of the block. This technique of placing the paper on the press bed, then the block on top, eliminates the worry of picking up accidental ink from the recessed areas.

So I'm quite pleased overall with the final image:



I took a course on composition this past fall with Lalita Hamill (who is, by the way, a fabulous instructor and very knowledgeable about composition) through the Federation of Canadian Artists. We discussed the use of colour as a design element: a tool to help the viewer's eye be led around an image, or be drawn to a focal area. Red is for areas of focal interest, yellow helps to move the eye around, and blue can be used as a boundary, or rest area for the eye, or as a contrast. Of course, these are huge generalizations, but they're interesting to keep in mind.

I tried to thoughtfully utilize colour in this image. Part of the colour choice was, of course, related to the subject matter: for example, in order to symbolize Quebec with the fleur de lis, the colours really needed to be white and blue. Do you think that the colour use in this piece helps to move your eye around it? What do you find that you look at first? How about the path your eye takes around the piece?

One of my favourite uses of colour in this is the touch of red in the quince; that little hit of warmth, as well as the fact that the only bit of gradient carving occurs there (everywhere else is solid colour block), helps to bring attention to the quince, which is, essentially, the point behind this piece. The queen's direction of gaze also draws an imaginary line to the quince, another device to draw the viewer's eye.

I find this piece quite fun. There's a lot of stuff to keep you interested. All of the symbols that I ended up using for Q were:

Quince (of course!!)
Queen
Quill
Queue (her braid)
Quercus (oak leaves & acorns)
Quilt
Question
Quebec

Did I miss any? I hope the participants in the exchange enjoy the print in their collection as much as I enjoyed developing it.

Fruit Alphabet Exhange Spoiler - Part 2

I started work on the actual print this week, in between snow shoveling. Dave had a bunch of MDF (medium-density fibreboard) that he said I could use, so I was keen to give it a try. He also bought me a FlexShaft for our Dremel rotary power carving tool. The FlexShaft is an extension of the tool that has a smaller diameter so that its easier to hold. It's also more maneuverable. The Dremel powers the extension piece, so you can carve easily without worrying about bumping the power control while carving, and it's lighter to use so your hands don't get tired quite as fast.


I did a few modifications to my original design. I liked the look of the crown, but then Dave reminded me that oak (Quercus species) starts with Q too, so I changed her crown to be one of oak leaves & acorns. I transferred the image to the MDF block by tracing the image with graphite paper (kind of like old-fashioned carbon paper, but less messy and much finer results). Unfortunately, the transfer wasn't quite strong enough, so I redrew the traced image with a pencil.


Then I revved up the Dremel & Shop-Vac and went to work.


Here it is inked up with the first ink colour:


I wanted to do this print on black paper, but that has its limitations. I find that the ink has to be pretty opaque to layer well. I don't quite have the patience to layer enough ink on for a purely opaque first layer, so the end result was a little grainy:


It actually looks pretty cool - kind of like stone. So, there it sat, drying, while we did more shoveling. And stuffed ourselves with Christmas fixings.

Next layer was the blue. I had originally planned on really bright, intense colours, but I changed my mind when doing the actual print; I figured that intense colours would likely be lost a little against the dark paper and grey background. So I tinted the colours down a bit.

The second layer was blue; I didn't want to remove all the non-blue elements of the block, because I'd need them later. It didn't really matter which colour I did next, but I figured blue was the easiest to create a mask for, as it represented large, solid areas on the print. I took one of the less than brilliantly printed ones and cut out the areas to be blue with an Exacto knife. I flipped the print over and masked the block so that I would only ink the parts exposed by the mask in blue.


Here's the block inked:


I thought I'd try a different registration method (why do I do my experimenting when I have to send the prints out to other printmakers?). I'm not usually very good at dropping the block onto a piece of paper, but this block, because it was thick, was easy to line up against the print and then gently lower down to the paper. Usually, I place the block on the press bed, then lay the paper on top. Using the paper on the press bed first then placing the block on top seems to work really well, at least with the thick MDF blocks. You can see that the design makes it easy for me to align the block with the print; there are carved lines that extend to the edge of the print (and block) which I can align.


Another benefit to laying the block onto the paper is that the paper doesn't get pressed into the block; so if the carving is low enough, but the brayer drops into the carved-out areas and leaves ink, then it doesn't print (yay!). You can see on this image the rough bits that are inked:


yet they didn't print:


I had to set up the block on the press with something to help keep the roller from running off the block or bumping up onto the block. I don't know that it would damage the press, but I can't imagine that it would be good for it.


Once again, the press worked absolutely beautifully. And this time I was using the Faust AquaLine inks, so I can't give any further thoughts about slipping yet. I'll try the DS inks at some point with the MDF to see how it goes. So far, the print is progressing very nicely. I have to wait a couple of days for the inks to dry before the last layer, where I'll try to do the two final colours at the same time.

Fruit Alphabet Exchange Spoiler - Part 1

I've signed on for the Four Oceans Press Fruit Alphabet Exchange, and selected Q, for quince. I started off being pretty literal with my idea for the print:


It was a bit of a play on the word "quince" ("fifteen" in Spanish; fifteen is a multiple of five, and five is a distinguishing characteristic of plants in the rose family) - there are five stages of the quince in the sketch - seed, flower, early fruit, ripening fruit, rotting fruit, with five seeds in the rotting fruit. The wasp is just to emphasize the concept of decay (plus I thought it would add an element of interest to the design). This image was based on a botanical illustration from the 19th century by Franz Eugene Köhler:


Not bad, but not quite yet what I was wanting. I started looking for other Q things:

(OK, so for those of you wondering "but fleur de lis doesn't start with a Q!", it's the symbol of Quebec, so there!), and came up with this sketch:

Now is the fun part. I started to use just about every image editing software tool loaded onto my computer (obtained via various digital camera, printer and scanner purchases over the years), and figured out what I wanted to do using TechSmith's SnagIt Editor for this:

Printed it, scribbled on it with pencil for this:

Scanned again & made monochrome:

Then I graduated to GIMP for this next one:

And then the final:
It's not that I couldn't have used GIMP from the beginning, but I'm just learning the software and don't have an actual, hold-in-the-hands user manual (...yet! I just pre-ordered the new Beginning GIMP manual from Amazon yesterday and I am anxiously anticipating its arrival hopefully in early January). I was frustrating myself at the beginning of this process with what to do in GIMP, so abandoned it for more tried-and-true software until I ran up against complexities I couldn't handle otherwise. I am excited about learning GIMP, because I've got lots of ideas I'd like to experiment with using the software. So I managed to learn a couple of things doing this little sketch; but it's a very sophisitcated piece of software, so there is a lot more to be discovered!

Now, this is just the working sketch. I still have some tweaks to do, but what do you think?

Christmas print exchange - Wet Canvas

Things I learned this week:

1. Remember not to move the press roller height when press not engaged (it kind of pooches your very carefully aligned pressure). For those of you that use a press all the time, this is obvious; for those of us who are just learning, not so much so, especially when the person operating the press is a bit of a fluffy bunny some times (yours truly).
2. Vinyl ("black linoleum") stretches when it goes through a press (and usually on your last run, when alignment most counts).
3. If anything is going to go wrong, it'll happen when you're working on something with either a deadline, or where the recipients are knowledgeable about your media, or both.

Mom & I did a collaborative print for our Printmakers Only Group Christmas cards, as well as for a Christmas print exchange organized through the Wet Canvas printmakers forum. Mom's image is a reduction of raccoon footprint in snow, mine is of rose hips and snow berries, as a border.

First Layer	Second Layer	Third Layer

And it looked great, right up until the last layer. This is what it should have looked like (this one got hand burnished, right at the end when we figured out what the heck was going on):

This is what most of them ended up looking like:

Although this is example (in the main focus of the image) is actually one of the better ones, not the worst, but you can see the examples along the bottom of the image are quite mis-aligned (the brown layer is out of alignment with the red layer). Here's the final batch:

I think that both Mom & I were maligning the Daniel Smith water soluble inks a little too carelessly; both of us had thought that the inks were causing the print to slip, hence the alignment on the layers of my Xocoatl print, and one of her prints, was definitely less than wonderful. As a result (and because we didn't have a lot of time to wait for ink to dry between layers), we used Speedball water soluble inks on this run. I was also thinking that it was my baby press that was causing the difficulties with a racking press bed for both the Xocoatl print and the print I did as a demo at the Delta "Gallery in the Garden" summer art fair (for which I used Faust inks). But as it's happening with the new large press (whose bed most definitely doesn't rack) and both were done using that black vinyl.

Now we're pretty sure that the stretching black vinyl through the press is the root of the problem. I understand about the pressure having to not be ridiculously intense, and it wasn't at the beginning, yet it seemed to get a bit stronger for the last run (even though neither of us touched the pressure adjustment between runs). Maybe the pressure was just a little strong at the end. I will try again another time with the vinyl and less pressure, and see what happens, although I have found that for enough pressure to transfer the ink uniformly and well, that results in enough pressure to stretch the vinyl, if my Xocatl and demo prints were anything to go by. I will have to try some different materials for blocks and see what happens when printed with my three ink types (Daniel Smith, Faust & Speedball) and on the two different presses.

But I do have to say, I loooooove the new press. What a joy to use. I can't wait to start creating some more stuff with it. But maybe not using that vinyl.

I tried a new (for me) registration option: the vinyl was squared into a little matboard frame, cut specifically to fit the block, and attached to the press bed. The card stock was aligned appropriately then traced onto a piece of paper taped underneath that matboard frame. So every time we went to print, we'd align the vinyl block in its little frame, then line up the card stock with the outline on the press bed.

And, if the vinyl hadn't stretched, I think the registration would have worked beautifully. Sigh.

So to those of you whom are receiving these prints, we apologize for the less than ideal alignment of the layers; it wasn't for lack of trying and apparently not from lack of consistency in methodology. At least you'll get the spirit of the print, if not the intention! One of these days, my exchange reduction prints are going to work beautifully, darn it!

"Xocoatl" - Exchange Print Spoiler

OK, not strictly true. I have actually done a little art lately.

I've signed up for the Four Oceans Press "Food Alphabet" exchange, and I'm doing "X". Why? Because I like a challenge. So a good chunk of my "art" time the last few months has been devoted to researching "xocoatl" (also "xocolatl"), the Mayan/Incan bitter hot chocolate beverage, and scheming how I'd use all this stuff in an image.

The other bits of "art" time have been spent procrastinating because I didn't really want to do almost 30 prints hand-burnished with my wooden spoon in reduction. So I was dithering about a design that would look good in monochrome, and that I wouldn't hate by the end of the process. Unfortunately, I was getting stumped. I also didn't really want to pull something 6"x8" entirely with hand-burnishing for that many prints; that is way bigger than I normally do, and it was somewhat discouraging.

Fortunately for me, we recently did a field trip to Seattle (and, Daniel Smith), and I got a very early birthday present. I am now the proud owner of a Richeson baby press.

Baby Press!!!!!

And it's lovely. And it did a beautiful job on the prints. Except...the press bed racks at the end of the pull. It's just the metal bed that came with the press, and it's not perfectly flat. When it racks, the print smears just at the end. So I don't have perfect registration on my prints (which really chaps my hide, but I'm just letting it be).*(see ed. note at bottom) The prints are actually really nice, they're just not perfect, which, I suppose, underscores their hand-made-ness.

Printing Xocoatl
holding the press bed in line to prevent racking

Dave has a scheme to make me a new press bed; I know I could just buy a replacement, but I really like his idea and am anxious to try it. Hopefully, he'll have an opportunity to make it before I do more printing.

Incidentally, not only is this the first print edition pulled on my brand new press, it's also the first time I've used the Daniel Smith water-soluble relief inks, and I think, really the first reduction edition I've pulled that is a) that large an edition in number and b) that physically large a print. So, all of these "firsts" add up to a bit of a learning curve, but I'm still really happy with the print.

By the way, darn Daniel Smith for not having 1 lb cans of transparent medium in this product any more - for all of you out there who use DS water-soluble inks, do you not use transparent base? Do you realize how much pigment you get with even about a half mix of each? Not to mention the lovely "glow" of inks layered through each other... I wish they'd bring the pounders back, but not enough people were buying them. Sigh.

OK, enough excuses (I seem to be doing a lot of that lately!), here's the process:

First layer was just a solid block of very subtly greened yellow. I used the back of my carving block to do it, and there were some interesting contour lines in the material that showed through in the print (but not enough to show on a scan or photo, unfortunately). Next layer was just red (with lots of trans base):

Xocoatl - 2nd state

Next layer was a rusty brown colour. Here's a shot of the inked piece of black linoleum, using a square at one corner for block registration, and pieces of tape with "t-bar" markings to do t-bar registration (I use the t-bar registration for lithographs and it seems to work pretty well overall).

Registration layout

Xocoatl - 3rd state

The final layer was a deep dark chocolate (of course!) colour:

Xocoatl, 2008
8"x6", edition of 30
Daniel Smith water-soluble relief inks on Strathmore Bristol

The elements of the design are what, arguably, the ingredients of the original xocoatl drink would have been made from. Clockwise from top left, vanilla bean, maize, achiote, chili pepper and of course, cacao. I'm very pleased overall with the print (save for the less than perfect registration, grrr), and I love the "noise" marks in the images, especially the pepper. I think that pepper is my favourite part of the whole print.

Ed: It's not the press. The bed wasn't racking, it was the stupid "black linoleum" (vinyl) stretching under the pressure of the press. I just tested it again with a mounted block of linoleum; paper first, then block face down, and a heavy cardboard sheet to protect the roller, and voila! It worked beautifully. Baby press wonderful, vinyl I'm starting to hate.