Further Printing - "Exposed" Block Print

Well, after some challenges yesterday, the challenges continued this morning. I received some excellent direction from fellow printmakers with much more experience than I on Wet Canvas. Taking some of those suggestions on, I did manage some better success this afternoon after switching to Faust AquaLine water-soluble inks, still on the kitakata paper. I don't know why. They are more transparent (as discussed with Becky Heimann on Inkteraction), which makes building up darks somewhat more of a challenge. But, the print seemed to go better, and although I did get some "push", it wasn't as bad as with the Daniel Smith inks seemed to get.

Some details:

Anyway, a printmaking friend of mine who's seen my press sent me extremely detailed instructions to set the roller height from scratch, so I shall print those off and give that a go. I've never used an etching press, so I desperately needed these!

Next I'll try a blue black on white paper. The paper will be heavier, so overall the result will be different.

Moth Study

I've been entertaining myself by submitting ID requests into the BugGuide.net (a great volunteer, mostly expert amateur, resource to identify all sorts of insect and insect-like critters) to find out what insects I've been taking pictures of.

While one of my favourites remains:

not the least of which reason is the name: golden dung fly (honestly, that says it all); but I also submitted a lovely-patterned moth photo:

which turned out to be a type of Sphinx Moth, and I wanted to do something with it.

Being more interested in the print and the result rather than spending time on the drawing (I'm lazy - that's normally how I work for prints), I traced the photo onto onion skin (very thin, lightweight tracing paper) then rubbed the tracing onto my piece of Safety Kut. Then it was just a matter of carving those delicate little lines.

This first print is just one colour (Faust AquaLine water soluble relief ink, using a lot of transparent base to very little pigmented ink, to get a nice, transparent feel to the print) on natural Kitakata paper, and the image size (for all of them) is about 3 1/5"x 5".

The second print is the same, with a little bit of darker ink rolled onto the body & tips of the wings.

The last print is the darker ink on Thai Chiri Kozo paper which has then been wet-mounted onto grey Rising Stonehenge.

While the photos really don't do the images justice (they flatten the texture and sheen of the papers), they give you at least some idea of what the print looks like. I am particularly happy with the print on the Thai Chiri Kozo - that really helps the moth to hide out on the paper, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

As for mounting, I know I didn't do it exactly right, but it has been done with archival media (nori paste), and it looks pretty good (although I screwed up one, darn it). It would be so much easier to do this with a press, but there ya go.

Christmas Card Chaos

I couldn't decide on what to do for Christmas cards this year. I usually do something for family & friends, as well as for customers who have purchased my work during the year (so that translates to roughly 60 cards altogether), but this year I also had two print exchanges for an additional 40 cards. After Goosey's demise, I had wanted to do something to commemorate him again, but the idea I had was more complicated than I felt like working on (especially for so many prints).

Sketch for card using Goosey as the subject
(those are snowflakes in the background)

I had worked on another image a couple of years ago in acrylic that I was never very happy with, but I liked the idea:

Acrylic on board, 8"x10"

I really like the feeling of the finch sitting on the cold, bare, slightly snow-dusted branches, so I took the same source photo and simplified the overall look to get this year's general (i.e. to friends & family) card:

I carved the image into wood-mounted linoleum and printed it using the Adana 4x6 No 2 on Strathmore Bristol paper using Speedball water-soluble inks. The image is 5 1/2"x3". I was pretty happy with the text (first time I've used it really in a print - have to write backwards for the text to read correctly; cheers for computer software & printers!!). It performed sufficiently, but I still wasn't 100% pleased.

I thought I'd try my hand at chine collé. So I printed the piece first on kitakata green paper (a thin Japanese paper), then mounted it (using nori paste) onto Cartiera Magnani "Pescia", a stiffer, supposedly "creamy smooth" printmaking paper, although it's really rough (cold pressed) with quite a tooth, and very thick. I'd ordered it from Dick Blick in a "what the heck" moment, but I don't really think it's appropriate for relief printing, or at least not what I do.

Really, for the chine collé, you're supposed to place your fine paper on top of your inked plate, dust with nori powder or paste the back of the fine paper, then place your mounting paper on top, and run everything through a press. As I don't have a press, this wasn't going to work. And the whole point to using finer paper was so that I wouldn't have such a hard time burnishing to transfer the image. Unfortunately, the Speedball doesn't ever really loose its water solubility, so the moist paste spread very thinly on the back still slightly activated the dried ink on the front, resulting in a few of these with a couple of tiny smudges here or there.

The card will be folded between the text & image, so that the image sits facing forward. The fold is not centred, so you end up with kind of an interesting card. I love the pale green of the kitakata paper, and it has a beautiful finish that's just a dream to print on. I'm definitely going to use it again.

Finally, I had one more image I wanted to play with. I have been working on this image in various print media over this year. First was a stone lithograph, then an acrylic monotype, and now I've done it in a linocut relief print.

The original image was a pencil sketch of a photograph I took up at Dad's one winter. I really love the contrast of the aspen against the conifers in the background, and the neat textures of the bark on the aspen.

For this relief print, I wanted the image smaller, so I scanned the sketch, reduced the dimensions, mirror-flipped it, and printed it off, then stuck it onto the lino block.

I used graphite paper to trace the image onto the block (so the graphite paper is placed between my working sketch and the block). This is great stuff because the resulting line is quite fine, and I can erase the graphite before I print, so that I don't get graphite transferring onto the final paper.

I removed all the areas that I wanted to stay white using wood carving tools to carve away the linoleum. Here's a photo of the inked up lino block showing the carving details:

I ran a few proofs and fiddled a bit with the image, but then was happy with the result pretty quickly. The final prints (so far only 20 for the second print exchange, but I think I'll do more), are on Rising Stonehenge grey paper, and the image size is 6.25"x3.5", printed using Faust's AquaLine water-soluble "Carbon Black". It's very buttery to use, a bit stinky, but I really like using it, and it seems to print quite well on heavy paper with hand burnishing (an unusual find, for me!).

Pays d'Hiver (Winter Country)

I'm very pleased with the end result (this photo is somewhat warmer than the actual print), and will be doing more than 20 for the edition. But my arms have given up tonight so I won't be doing any more prints for a little while.

Experimentation

Today was definitely a day for experimentation. I used a completely different kind of paper - I don't know the name of it because I bought it years ago from Paper-Ya, but it looks kind of like someone put bark mulch through a grinder & turned it into paper. I also used a different kind of registration system (thanks to Andrew Gott!):


Dave epoxied a three-hole-punch made for binders onto a nice heavy piece of Plexiglas for me. I set up the cardboard right-angle to nestle the block up against to have consistent block registration. The paper registration comes from punching the paper into the hole-punch. Theoretically, anyway. Unfortunately, it didn't work so well with this super-thin paper - by the end of the 5 colour run, I had more ellipses than circles for holes.. The registration kept slipping. But I did end up with better overall results in the registration department than if I had used my more traditional registration setup.

Finally, I was more "organic" in the development of the piece. Normally, I use photographs and work very strictly from them. This time, I just did a quick sketch from a reference photo, and then went to work on the block. So most of the image was developed on the block itself, rather than in a drawing before hand. As a result, I have quite a few trial proofs, whereas usually I'll only get one or two.

I suppose also, this is a bit of a change from me in subject matter. I usually just do stuff, or objects, or animals, whatever, just because they interest me. I had an idea when I started to look at the reference photo (which other than having a coyote in it, doesn't look like this at all), and the expression on the coyote's face really struck me. So the theme of this piece is a bit of "ambiguity". The title is "Guilty" - and although it's not really clear from the end result, the coyote is trotting through a garbage dump. So why "Guilty"? That's up to you to decide!

The dimensions of the piece are approximately 3.75"x3.75", and of course, done in Speedball water soluble ink (no, I haven't got any other inks yet!!). Oh, yeah, and another experiment (although not accomplished yet) will be to somehow mount these flimsy pieces of paper onto something more substantial (e.g. the Rising Stonehenge paper that I've used before). Given that Speedball stays "active" as it were (i.e. when it dries, it is NOT waterproof), using traditional paste will be somewhat of a challenge. I'll give it a go on the crappy alignment ones first to see how that works.

So, here's the process:

First state - layer of slightly warmed very light grey as a foundation layer, but still some paper showing through (very hard to see in this photo).

Guilty - First State
Originally uploaded by Amie Roman

Second state - layer of yellow, with some of first layer showing through.

Guilty - Second State
Originally uploaded by Amie Roman

Third state - layer of darker grey.

Guilty - Third State
Originally uploaded by Amie Roman

Fourth state - layer of dark rust.

Guilty - Fourth State
Originally uploaded by Amie Roman

Final state - actually two colours; background has a dark olive/army green, foreground has very dark chocolate brown. Tricky brayering is how that happened!

Guilty - Final State
Originally uploaded by Amie Roman

It's hard to tell from the photo, but there is actually a different colour in the background, and it makes a lot of difference compositionally. In this photo the final colour on the coyote and the background final colour look the same, which results in less distinction between the coyote and the background. In real life, there is a difference, and therefore the coyote stands out better. I suspect it's from twiddling with the exposure with software that did it, as I took the photo under incandescent bulbs, no flash, at night. I'll try scanning when it's dry to see if it makes any difference.