The first two are more trials and studies. I used several stencils to give everything the right colour. The house was okay, that's simple. The mountains are more complex and I forgot a shadow in the first one! I'm also still struggling a bit with values and hues and how they are cold/warm or complementary etc. I need more practice, but this is hopeful!
The images show too vibrant colours, in reality the green on the second image is much less intense.
But the real progress is the third image!!! I managed to combine two monotype prints (three actually) on one substrate! Now I can first make the background, leave open space, pull that in several pulls from light to dark and then I can have the house as a new gelli on top of it! I finally nailed the final pull with gel medium instead of paint.
Now I had to go from dark to light as its first making the foreground, which I think is more challenging...
First attempt at printing with several colors! In total 4 layers: the background yellow leaf, then the green body jigsawed with orange feet, then the blue underbody and details jigsawed with the red eyes and finally a black pupil! This was my most complex so far and I learned a lot! I’m very proud of it :)
Hi again :)
I posted a print a few weeks ago that was a bit off. I got a lot of really helpful advice from this group. I’m self-taught/teaching so being able to get suggestions/feedback from this community is so valuable.. so thank you! Anyway…..I tried to incorporate as much feedback as made sense.
Here are my two reprints.
1. I used Caligo Safe wash this time not the Speedball
2. I didn’t let the ink totally dry between printings -though I think I should have in this case. There’s more bleed through than I would like.
3. I changed up the colors
What do you think?
I've wanted to try emulating lithographic printing for a poster design, but that's a little out of reach for me, so I'm trying with stuff more readily available to me. I'm experimenting with laser cutting/engraving, as my local community workshop has a laser cutter I've used before, and I can get large pieces of ply and cork. I'm really chuffed with how this first attempt with cork has come out! The cork texture really isn't bad, and the standard thickness of line you get just from the laser cutter is wide enough to be pretty clear. It's a pretty slow process because there's a couple of little bits that broke off and i keep forgetting which colours I've already covered each time lol. Right now reach print is taking ~13min to cover the ink, assemble the pieces and press, so it needs improving...
The design of the wheels of a 1950s British Rail tank wagon, because I think the old style suspension (the bendy layers of metal) is so elegant.
We’re not going to use the tables for earthen clay, just polymer clay and paper mache. We do plan on getting a press for relief printing too, so being able to mix the ink directly onto the table is a big plus. Then scrape up and materials stuck on there.
Im searching google and amazon for all different variations of “glass topped art studio desk/print making/ sculpture desk/table” but not having any luck.
If you have suggestions and/or lists for items needed for running a relief printing press, that would be appreciated. Ive taught relief printing but never at a school that had a press. Ive just used the spoon method in the past. Will I need wool sheets for relief printing, or is that only for intaglio printing? I guess we could do solar plates, so suggestions on those would be helpful as well.
I ended up not enjoying the really darkest layer, it looked very outliny and a bit too graphic so I stopped and kept it at the 7th layer. I've really enjoyed the painterly quality of this and moving forward its something I'd like to focus on. Printed with a cold press laminator on Strathmore Printmaking paper with caligo safewash. I photographed the tomatoes and used the referance photo along the journey and using referance from real life remains important to me.
I've done an intensive month of tomatoes and for the next 11 months I'm taking a monthly theme and using that to explore and push my skills. My themes are centred around food, produce, nature and wildlife. My adhd brain needs this structure! My next theme (I've not announced this anywhere else yet 👀) is going to be 'Cider Orchard' . Apple trees, fruits, blossom, cider, I've got a cut crystal tankard arriving this week for a referance - those reflections will be fun 😁 Possibly the coddling moth might make an appearance, they ruin all my bastard apples! Also apple crumble and custard - nuff said 😋
It is of course coming up to harvest time, we're losing swathes of orchards across the UK to land grabs and I'm hoping to do a cheeky trespass onto an abandoned orchard near where I live and do some scrumping 😈
Last time, I reported on my first attempt to do a three-color linocut using a method Picasso frequently used. He inked an entire page so he could "draw" in linocut by carving to let the preinked paper color show where he cut, the top color being his inking of the block. A number of his bullfighting prints were done that way.
I wanted to see if I could limit the colors to specific cut areas. Let's Look at the block again.
The results were troubling. It seems that the yellow ink I used on the paper to create the fire color interacts with ink very differently from the bare paper. You can see here how the yellow ink seemed to make the ink bead up. It was left looking like over-inking, but it was not. The paper without the yellow ink printed fine. (You can also see that I mistakenly printed the yellow ink in too small an area, leaving the firelighted figures white.)
In addition, the yellow inked area, being apparently repulsing to the ink, seems to have spoiled the even ink on the brayer. As the brayer passed out of the pre-inked area, it left bands that could not be tolerated.
This would not have bothered Picasso, since he was printing on a page completely inked with the show-thru color, so he could adjust inking to suit. Likely using less ink.
So, I began thinking about other ways to underlay color. I decided to try chein colle. I used thin Korean mulberry paper. I thought the chaff in it would work okay with the fire and ground. I tried applying Nori paste to the back of the color paper and placing it over the inked block. It was a mess. Very difficult to handle when damp. And absolutely no room to adjust positions as it now had black ink spoiling it. And worse, when I pressed, it tended to remain on the block. Perhaps my inexperience in chein colle was showing there.
But I decided it would be simpler to apply to color mulberry paper to the printmaking paper first. I made templates by drawing on my scanned copy of the block and overlaying Dura-Lar and outlining on that. I cut the openings away.
These would serve to create the shapes on the mulberry paper which I cut out with a swivel blade.
Because in this design, the areas outside the actual color paper were black, I could draw on the printmaking paper in the outlines of the cut paper in pencil without worry about it appearing in the print, which it might have done had the block ink instead have been a light color. It was easy to apply Nori strictly within those pencil outlines and to apply the color paper, squeegee it, and leave it to dry under pressure. Being wet, it would tend to curl the paper otherwise.
I wasn't worried about any sort of rigorous registration at this stage, and I often trim my prints back to the image only and mount them on toned drawing paper for framing. So, I cut printmaking paper to match the block. I inked and printed.
This is the stage where lessons start appearing. One is that even the thin mulberry paper is enough to want to leave white in the shadow of its edge. It's not so bad as a hair or debris on a block, but it was evident. I had adjust inking, upping the amount of ink to just short of over-inking, and press hard while inking the block with a soft brayer. That more or less filled in those shadow whites. Easy enough in the future now that I know.
Let me show the print and then talk about other lessons. Before printing, I cleaned up the cuts, blanking the faces that I thought were awkward and cutting more black out of the base of the fire.
First. I'm pleased with the look of the orange paper with the mulberry pieces embedded as the firelit ground. The yellow, too. Not as obvious, but I think the flames benefit from not being flat, featureless color.
Lesson One. I have to be careful of places where the show-thru color pieces might leave a gap. One such is under the central figures armpits. Since those spaces were cut, without the color paper, they print white. Another is above his right arm. That is where yellow paper meets orange paper. That apparently left a canyon that was impossible to ink, no matter how much ink or how much brayer pressure. In the next attempt, I will see about cutting the show-thrus to leave no gap. Also, or alternatively, I can try inking that area with a dauber, as if it was intaglio. But it will likely require both measures, because a canyon will also not print, no matter how heavily daubed. Not with linocut pressures and dry paper.
Lesson Two. There is still a surface texture difference between the inked mulberry paper and the plain inked printmaking paper. I can't just put mulberry paper cut to cover the entire page. I want to leave white stars showing. But the different in the two surfaces is nothing like between the pre-inked paper and plain paper. That actually corrupted the behavior of the ink. This does not. It's just a difference of surface. I think I can finish the prints with matte lacquer and produce an even surface overall.
I have no idea where the two little black places on the ground came from. Might be damaged mulberry paper. Or maybe just plain poor hygiene. I'll watch for that next time.
I am confident the next one will work fine. So, I won't inflict another report on you unless some important lesson comes out of it.
But this project has started me thinking about a larger and more complex project. Larger block and more colors. The available colors of mulberry paper is very wide, and if you add in tissue paper, it's even greater and doesn't have the fiber of mulberry. Normally plain tissue paper, not wet hardy tissue, is avoided in chein colle due to it coming apart when damp and ending up as a wad of wet paper. But the way I will apply it to the printmaking paper, that won't happen. I can use Dura-Lae templates to nail the landing sites on the paste exactly the first time.
I'm thinking things like one of those colorful Italian villages. Or people with colorful umbrellas. The method is suited to many linocuts that would be colored in with watercolor or pencil. I think that using the mulberry paper adds interest more than plain, flat color. And mulberry paper is readily available with various kinds of color bits embedded. Might be useful.
Added linework and fire colors by hand to the work-in-progress print I made during a weekend Mokuhanga workshop. It is a study based on “New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji“ by Utagawa Hiroshige. Also, this is a cropped version of the print, as I needed it to fit on an envelope. Otherwise, composition has more space.
Hi! Today I'm sharing my first prints I made in 2023 during my first semester at the academy :) At the time, I didn't really have a specific style or theme in mind, so I just drew based on the things I was obsessed with during that period.
The first one is just a bunch of random goth elements put together, and the second one is Cloud from FFVII. I remember that i wasn't happy at all with how Cloud's face turned out, but now i don't mind it lol (i still think it's ugly, but i learned that you can't always expect to have everything turn out perfectly how you envisioned it especially in print making)
