Williams Lake Workshop

Well, ladies & gentlemen, as you can see from the delay between last post and this, I've not been particularly active art-wise. The summer months, especially end of August, are taken over with work in the garden, and, as a result, work in the kitchen to put away all those goodies for the rest of the year. You can check out what I've been up to in the garden & kitchen (and a little R&R on the side!) on my other blog, Roman Life.

That said, I just came back from a trip up to my Dad's in Horsefly, and at the beginning of that trip was a fantastic weekend, hosted by the Cariboo Arts Society, where I taught an introductory relief printmaking workshop.


We started the weekend with a discussion of materials and tools used. For this workshop, I had insisted that everyone use the soft carving materials, like Safety Kut or Speedy Cut, for their blocks, because I find that most people are able to carve those materials fairly easily, especially if they don't have great strength in their hands. I showed them different tools to carve with, and of course discussed safety and sharpening (not that I'm the best instructor for sharpening!).

(C) Sylvia Pare

I'd asked everyone to bring some source material, and to choose something to work on that would just be black and white. I demonstrated how I transfer an image from my sketchbook or a photo by tracing onto onion skin tracing paper, then flipping that paper and rubbing the image onto the soft carving block. That automatically reverses your image so that the printed version will come out in the same orientation as your original drawing. This technique works beautifully for the soft vinyl composite blocks, but I haven't had much success with transferring to linoleum that way. As a result of the reversal of the image, we discussed the fact that what you're carving needs to be mirror-image of what you want to end up with on your paper. That always causes a bit of consternation, but if you've got your tracing to work from, and if the tracing paper is thin enough, you can always flip over the tracing paper so that you're looking through the back side of it, giving you the same image that is sitting on your block.

(C) Jo Ann Hamm

Everyone worked away at carving their blocks for a while, then I demonstrated rolling up the ink on the palette, building up thin layers rather than gobbing it all down in one go. People got really good by the end of the second day recognizing the sound of too much ink, or the feel of not enough ink. We were working with Speedball, and that was a bit of a disaster. It seized up almost immediately. I'd fortunately purchased retarder, which worked quite well, but it still gummed up pretty quickly. At the end of the weekend, I'd asked whether they'd rather have me provide better quality inks for a materials charge, and they'd all agreed that would have been better. The only problem is, of course, as one student pointed out, that they wouldn't have known about the challenges of working with Speedball, and might not have understood the value of having better ink provided for a charge. The other problem is that most people have easier access to Speedball, whereas all other water-soluble inks are mail order only from the States, and that definitely gets a bit pricey, and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to ask people to purchase their own inks first in that case. I didn't want people to use oil-based inks for this workshop, mostly because the smell makes me sick, and I didn't feel like having a huge sinus headache the whole weekend!

(C) Leslie Lloyd & Lynda Sawyer

While everyone was working on their black & white images, and proofing, and printing, I went on to discuss some simple options for adding colour. You can print on papers that are different colours: everyone tried printing on black paper, using either straight white, or inks that had a bit more white mixed in. Some people had small enough images to try out the Mr. Ellie Pooh Paper samples in shades of lavender, golden orange and natural, that I'd brought. Then we discussed using different coloured inks, and I demonstrated a couple of options. Obviously, just a single colour of ink pre-mixed on your palette, then rolled up onto the block is the simplest, but I also showed how you can use the inks in a more painterly manner, by using multiple brayers and selectively adding colour to the image, like I had done for this print. We also discussed using the back of the block to do a solid colour first, then ink the carved image in another colour, and printing that on top (like this one). Finally, I demonstrated the "rainbow" or blend roll (as I had done in this recent print), and provided everyone with a copy as a sample for their records. Everyone tried their hand at different techniques, and came up with some lovely results.


At the end of the day, I discussed the reduction cut method to create a multiple-colour print carved from a single block. I explained the process, then asked them to think about an image they'd like to use, and to work out what the light, middle and dark value shapes were in that image. Then I asked that they do a tracing of each set of shapes, separately, so that they could consider how they might have to break down the image for carving the next day. I also suggested that they think about what colours they wanted to use, keeping in mind the values they'd need to achieve with those colours, and maybe write them down on the separate tracings.

(C) Leslie Lloyd

We reconvened the next morning, and everyone had either brought value sketches or tracings of what they wanted to work on. I reviewed the process, and suggested that everyone start with carving away whatever they wanted to remain the colour of the paper. One of the students wished to start with a solid colour, so she inked up the back of her block and printed a series of those first. I made sure that everyone was aware that they should decide how many prints they wanted to end up with in their edition, then add at least another 3 or 4 to that for margin of error.

(C) Lynda Sawyer

Before everyone started inking and proofing, I went over a few different registration methods, including the simplest one of positioning the block on the paper, then flipping everything over to burnish the back of the paper to transfer the print. I also showed them how to do T-bar registration and how to use two right angle corners to align first block then paper repeatedly. Everyone decided that simple was best, and chose the first option for their registration, and it worked very well for almost all of their prints, such that very few were spoiled due to mis-registration.

(C) Sylvia Pare

Some students stuck with just three colours: paper as the lightest value, a mid-value, and a dark value, but a couple were very brave and printed three or four colours. One even printed I think five!! Ideally, they should have allowed the inks to dry longer between prints, but the one student who printed the most layers was happy with the textures that were achieved by overprinting still-tacky ink. At the end of the day, everyone managed at least a two-colour reduction, and many went even further. Again, I worked on a demo piece which I sent home with them as a sample for reference to the reduction method.

(C) Kathryn Steen

I was absolutely blown away by the enthusiasm of the students, and their intense focus during the whole weekend, as well as their incredible productivity. Everyone went home with many prints, and with a better appreciation of the relief printmaking process. I am very pleased with the results, and am very grateful for the opportunity to have worked with such a talented crew. I hope they invite me back so that we can play with printmaking some more!!

(C) Kris Andrews

Thank you, Cariboo Arts Society, for the opportunity to share some of my knowledge and experience.

(C) Jo Ann Hamm

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!

Koi - experimenting with inks

I received some sample ink colours (yellow ochre, Cadmium primrose yellow, Cadmium red medium light, and I think one more, but I can't recall what it is now!) from Faust in their AquaLine series of water soluble inks (see here and here for my ink trials where I included Faust inks). I was in conversation with Peter Faust about wanting some other colours, and he again very generously sent me some samples to play with. I believe I received the inks in spring. I didn't get around to trying this until the summer. I was kind intending on blogging about this as soon as it was finished, but when I'd done my "last" layer, I didn't think it was finished, so I put it away until this week. When I pulled it out and had a look at it again, I decided that it was as finished as it was going to get, that I was happy enough with it to edition, and that I might try again but using the MDF in future. Again, this was printed with the black linoleum, which, I now understand, stretched under the pressure of the press (this was the first edition I did on the big press, I believe).

The purpose of this print was twofold: to experiment with my lovely new sample inks, and to try to create a print using very translucent colours. I really wanted the colours of all the layers to come through. Well, I succeeded, and hoped that the final colour would be more opaque, but it wasn't. As a result, the sloppy, er, selective inking that I'd done with the rather opaque cad red showed through more than I wanted.

OK, so here's the WIP:

The first layer is far too pale to see well in the photo, but it was enough to let some of the paper show through. It was a very subtle layer of mostly transparent medium with a touch of pigment, I believe the cad primrose.

The second layer is selectively inked to just add some darker primrose to the body:

The third layer is primrose with a touch of cad red, again just selectively inked on the head:

The fourth layer is now starting to show the volume of the image, the shading of the under-parts, and defining the fins. This is a very translucent layer with a hint each of ultramarine and raw umber:


A slightly darker fifth layer, continuing with the previous idea, with a little more ultramarine in the mix:

The sixth layer is primarily transparent medium, with some cad red:

I thought the red would be covered by the final layer, you can still see some of the rough brayering in the background. I sort of fixed it by brayering a bit more red all around the background, which made it less blue than I'd hoped, but here's the final layer (I think mostly ultramarine and raw umber but also some transparent medium:

As I said, the print worked well enough for an edition, albeit small (only five). I really like the way the translucent layers work. I'd like to try again, but a little more careful application of the brayer next time, or perhaps two blocks (which likely is what I should have done in the first place!). I shall be shipping one of these to Faust to thank them for their samples.

Pig finished

I spent the last few days finishing off the pig print, and it's finally done today. The more I work with the MDF and the Dremel tool, the happier I am with them.

This print was done with the Daniel Smith water soluble relief inks. I am very happy with their performance, too. I don't think that those inks were slipping during my Xocoatl print, but I am now positive that it was the black linoleum stretching instead. It's printed onto cream Rising Stonehenge paper; the colours of the photos are a little off. So if you look at the paper as being cream, that'll give you an idea of what the print should look like; these photos are a little too cool/blue.

The second colour was a pink made by mixing some permanent red and a little yellow ochre into the pink I'd used in the first layer.

The fourth layer is about 50/50 ink/medium mix, with mostly yellow ochre and a very little amount of burnt umber. I wanted the pink to come through more than if I'd just used yellow ochre straight out of the tube.

The final layer is a dark brown made up of quite a mix: there's a wee bit of phthalo blue, some yellow ochre, burnt umber, and a bit of mars black.


I'm very pleased with this print. I feel that I really captured the pigginess of the sow. I really like the colours that I used, too.

New Press

So the new (to us) press is finally installed. And I'm no where near it to take advantage, sigh. Ah, well, at least I have the baby press at home to play with, and I actually have some time this weekend to do some art, amazing though that sounds.

And I have some new ink colours to test drive, care of Faust Inks. They have asked me to give these new colours & new formulation a test and let them know the results. Well, unfortunately, the new inks have been sitting patiently waiting my efforts for at least a month, so it's about time I got off my duff and slapped some ink on that brayer!

Thoughts on new inks & press

I'd like to respond to some of the comments made about the Xocoatl post, as there are some good points that I'd like to make available to others (who might not think to read all the comments on a post!).

I, too, just started using [Daniel Smith water-soluble inks]. The consistency was fine (except for the yellow), but the drying time was crazy slow unless the paper was damp. Do you print successive colors right away or wait for each to dry? - Joan

Drying time of inks depends on paper, humidity, layers of ink, and of course the ink itself.

Prints on sized paper tend to dry slower than unsized because the sized paper can't absorb the moisture from the ink as well. If you soak or moisten sized paper before printing, you will remove at least some of the sizing (the longer you soak, the more sizing is removed, and the more the fibres swell to absorb more water into the interior of the paper, until, eventually, the paper is completely saturated - which is probably way too long for most relief printmaking techniques!), so that's why some relief printmakers like to soak/moisten their paper first.

Obviously, if you live in a humid environment, inks just dry slowly. As an aside, I had a rather entertaining thing happen to me when I was in Australia. I was working on little watercolour sketches as Christmas presents for the family that I was staying with, and I tried to use the salt technique: when you throw salt into still-damp watercolour painted onto paper, the salt draws the pigment-loaded moisture off the paper into the salt crystal and leaves neat trails of lighter areas in the painted surface. Really beautiful. Except, this time, the salt was absorbing the moisture from the atmosphere (it was about 95% relative humidity!), rather than from the pigment, so I just ended up with salt-watercolour. The point is, if there's lots of moisture in the air, any moisture from the ink will not be drawn up into the air. If you're inks cure (see below), that can also be affected by atmospheric conditions, as it is a chemical reaction.

With just one layer of ink, unless you're somewhere really humid, it shouldn't take more than a day (for the Daniel Smith water-soluble inks) to at least dry to the touch, but you should let them cure for at least a week before packaging or framing. If you create a print with lots of layers, the drying time in between layers increases more and more. Progressive layers of ink also reduce and eventually eliminate the paper's possible effectiveness at absorbing some moisture from the inks.

Another consideration about layers of ink is the thickness of ink that you apply. I've noticed that a number of self-taught relief printmakers have a tendency to use quite a lot of ink on their brayer in one go, rather than accumulating lots of thin layers to obtain that level of intensity of colour. I certainly did that until I took a course with a professional printmaker and discovered that I had waaaaay too much ink on my brayer. It makes a huge difference in drying time. Some tell-tale signs that you're probably using too much ink (other than ridiculously long drying time!) include:

• ridges in the printed image where the surface tension of the thick ink pulls off the brayer and causes little pucker marks
• fine details filling in very quickly
• if you're observant enough, the ink also "zings" really stickily when there's too much ink as you're rolling the brayer over your inking slab. Zinging sound is good, just not super tacky-sounding for many relief printing inks (for comparatively tackier, like litho ink, the sound is different and stickier). That, of course, is entirely subjective, and requires that you just practice with your own inks & brayer.
  

Finally, if you're using an oil-based ink (like the Daniel Smith - they're still oil-based, just water soluble for ease of clean-up), the ink has to "cure" or polymerize to dry, rather than relying entirely upon evaporation of moisture like water-based inks.

So, with Speedball, I used to whip through about 5 or 6 layers of ink within a day's worth of printing, because Speedball inks pretty much dry by evaporation. Not any more with these new inks!! I waited about a day in between each layer (given that there were > 30 prints for each layer, I was happy to go and do something else!!), but really, for the last layer, I should have waited at least 2-3 days, as the third layer of ink wasn't quite dry enough to accept a fourth layer. But it worked out ok.

Richeson makes the blick presses. That being said, take a look at the phenolic bed. It's light and will not warp. Pretty happy with mine so far. - Curtis

Yes, I have heard great things about the phenolic beds; Dave's got an idea that we're both keen to try before we go spending more money on something that I might not actually need. Once he's had a chance to turn that idea into actuality, I'll definitely post the results here!

Ed: We didn't manage to successfully make a new bed, but it turns out that it's not necessary. 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.

"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.

Inspiration from Statues

There are two statues flanking the entrance to the Supreme Court of Canada building in Ottawa, sculpted by Walter S. Allward. To the west is Truth (Veritas) to the east is Justice (Justitia).
Neither are particularly typical of the traditional representations of these morals; they're both pretty dark, but especially the one of Justice. I took numerous photos of these statues when we were in Ottawa this autumn, and knew that I wanted to do something with them. I had originally intended to create a reduction cut print for both, but after the first colour, I knew that a monochromatic approach would be much more powerful and representative, to me, of the feeling of those statues.

I decided to use the new "black linoleum" that I picked up from Opus. It really is beautiful to carve. So beautiful, in fact, that I got somewhat carried away. "Truth" was the first one that I carved and before I got going on "Justice", I wanted to proof the image. I managed to patch one of my bad carving choices (it wasn't a mistake in the sense of an "oh crap my tool just slipped") but the other I just have to live with or recarve the image.

By carefully trimming the edge of base of the statue and using that edge as a template to cut the top of the plinth, I managed to patch this just fine. This only worked because I was able to carve texture over the seam. It's very helpful to have a woodworker around - Dave gave me the instructions for how to do the patch relatively seamlessly.

Anyway, here are the finished (for now) two prints - although the colours look different digitally, in real life, it's the same ink.

Truth (after Allward)
Technique: Relief print (using new "black linoleum")
Media: Faust AquaLine water-soluble inks, Masa paper
Dimensions: 11 1/2"x5 1/2"
Year: 2008

Justice (after Allward)
Technique: Relief print (using new "black linoleum")
Media: Faust AquaLine water-soluble inks, Masa paper
Dimensions: 11 1/2"x5"
Year: 2008

I am very pleased with the results. They're both very powerful images; there is one thing that really bugs me about "Truth" compositionally - can you spot it? But it doesn't make it a bad image, just less strong. I'm really pleased with "Justice"; I think that I managed to successfully capture the feeling of darkness that I got from the actual statue.

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.

Back to Basics

I've been switching back and forth between linoleum and Safety-Kut. When I use linoleum, I have to reverse my original image, then trace it onto the block using graphite paper, so that the image comes out the correct orientation. With Safety-Kut, I can trace my image onto tracing paper in the original orientation, and then flip the tracing paper over and burnish the traced image directly onto the block, which results in a mirror image on the block (what you need for printing). Unfortunately, I've got two images mixed up now because I did the wrong thing on each! Fortunately, with the linoleum piece (which is a complex reduction cut), it's not the end of the world; the image still works, it's just not as recognizable as a landmark, and becomes more generic. With the Safety-Kut piece, though, I have script on it, and that is very definitely wrong backwards, so I have to do it again!

Using the acrylic and transparent base mix for inks is also quite a learning curve. I tried probably more acrylic than 50% in the mix today, and it tacked up really fast. It was usable, but it didn't stay "open" for as long as it did the other day. So definitely, less acrylic works better. That's fine for translucent or transparent layers, but I wanted a nice solid block of opaque colour. Hmmm.

For translucent layers or "glazes", it's imperative to use a minuscule amount of colour to base, otherwise it's waaaaaay too strong. When I was working with Pat doing litho, he introduced me to the concept of much subtler ink colours, and would use just the tiniest smidgen of colour to a swath of trans base. I coined the term "baby bunny booger" as a precise measure of coloured ink. That still applies now; I just have to get used to the concept again. Soooo, I'll keep experimenting!

In the meantime, for your viewing entertainment (thanks for the link, Pat!):

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.

Next stage

So I spent all night last night fiddling with my Adana No. 2 4x6 (while the link is to a five-three, the image is very similar to my press) and my new sample inks from Faust Inks. Here is one of the better results (Faust AquaLine ink printed on Rising Stonehenge white, 245 gsm) from my last reduction plate:

Copy Cat II

The Faust "Relief Ink" was very stiff - almost like an etching ink. I didn't have much success with it, as I couldn't seem to get enough layers going. I suspect it might work well for my wood engraving, whenever I manage to get back to that again. And dampened paper really didn't work with water-soluble ink (although the paper was no longer wet, it still had moisture in the fibres). The Faust "AquaLine" ink has a beautiful buttery consistency, but it's kind of smelly (which doesn't do me any good). I seemed to require a lot of layers to get the ink depth required, and that strikes me as odd. Finally, I tried the Graphic Chemical ink again, and am just not happy with it. Sigh. I've had suggestions to try Akua Intalgio, so I'll maybe order some to try it, or see if anyone nearby has some that I can steal a small sample of.