Printmaking again

I made some prints on the theme of façade as preliminary thinking for the 2016 ATASDA Palm House exhibition. They didn't take me where I wanted to go but I learnt some stuff.

This print is Permaset printing inks on cartridge paper, as a test for what the plate looked like. Although it's not a great print, I like the feel of it.
 

This one was made with the same medium really wet and I love it. It's all moody and mysterious, which was not actually what I wanted for my particular part of the collaborative work but would have been fine alone, if it were a bigger print (it's A5).

Then there was this one on fabric. Same medium on off-white quilters' muslin. It's a three colour print, using deep pink, cream and emerald green. I was trying to create depth and shadows, to get the light falling strongly from above and to see whether repeat prints would give a better colour on cloth than I was getting with single prints.

It was one of those prints when everything just goes right. The registration method worked wonderfully. The fabric was nicely controlled by ironing freezer paper on the back, so it was more like paper to handle. The consistency of the medium was fine and it didn't dry out too much, something that has been happening with my Permaset inks over summer. The colour is more subtle than I 'd hoped, so it wouldn't work for the collaborative piece, and the small scale makes the fairly fine thread count of the cloth more of an element that I'm used to seeing.

But it made me go, "ah, I really like that", and that's exactly why we do this stuff, isn't it?

Printmaking #1

This year seems to be flying past, without me finding/making time to blog about what I'm doing. I have a long list of things to blog about!

First, some practical stuff. I'm always interested in finding new ways to make marks on fabric, so I've been really interested the prints that some artists are getting, using PVC foam board as their printing plate. Most aren't printing on fabric, though, and I think many are using oil-based printing media.

So I wanted to see how well a foam board printing plate would print with my water-based medium, and how it printed on fabric.

First, what am I actually talking about? It's not foam core, which has a paper surface (though I did call it that when I first used it back here). It's not polystyrene sheet, like you get in packaging around large appliances or in fruit and vegetable boxes. This is compressed PVC sheet, which is quite a rigid sheet. It's gradually replacing corflute in advertising signs and it's also used as an insulating sheet in buildings. These days, you can buy it in fine thicknesses and small sizes at art shops, as it's often used in mounting work, but that's the expensive method. I bought mine as a 1200 x 600 x 6mm sheet from a hardware chain, after a lot of walking to and fro and asking people. Sometimes it's with MDF board, sometimes with corflute, sometimes off by itself in a dark corner. I think that size should be plenty for sampling, don't you?

Why use this medium? It carves nicely but blunts tools in short order, so be prepared to sharpen and resharpen, if you plan to cut it like lino. However, it impresses beautifully, so I use different tools completely. My favourite is a set of tools for working polymer clay..

...supplemented by a set of ball point scribers.

If you wanted to keep it cheap, you could probably begin with an old biro or two, maybe with thicker and finer points.

My first plate was a little reference sheet for the first set of tools - only about 15cm x 7.5cm (6in x 3in). I won't show you the samples, but I wanted to see what kinds of lines I could get from each kind of tool and how useful it was for this process. Then I turned the plate over and drew a freehand design on the back, using the different tools in the ways I thought would be most effective.

My first prints were simple relief ones; basically just inking the plate with a roller and Permaset inks and printing onto dry cartridge paper with my baren.

I was happy with these - there's some good detail and reasonably good coverage.


Some of the lines on the plate were very deep, and over time ink built up in those incisions. As I needed to clean the plate anyway, I wondered if I could lift out that colour by changing the medium's texture. I sprayed the plate with water and printed the results.

All are really ghost prints, as I didn't add any more medium.

How interesting! This is a different look entirely. I was still using my baren and this is much better results than I've ever had from this technique without a press.

I experimented with damp paper but the results weren't markedly different. I think it would probably make a difference if I added more colour in a thicker medium over the top, as spritzing the plate tends to make relief prints spotty.

I always print while I'm cleaning the plate because I usually get interesting results. This time, the results blew me away.

This looks almost like a watercolour painting.

 
I wondered, can I add colour more specifically, rubbing it into the plate, wiping back and adding more colour, spritzing and then printing?

 
Yes, it looks like I can have a lot of control  over colour. The trade-off is in loss of fine detail and colour intensity.

Hmm, I think this approach offers a lot of possibilities!

A serendipitous find...

Just recently, I happened to be in a woodworking shop. Actually, I visit woodworking places reasonably often, but this particular woodworking place had something I'd never seen before.

Aren't they cute? They have some deep and important woodworking-y kind of use, which the very helpful salesperson explained to me. But I saw mark-makers, of the most delicious kind. A couple of weeks ago, I finally got to have a play with them, with my friend Claire.

How interesting! They are quite fragile with all the cut-outs, so we rolled them gently with a smaller diameter dowel inside.

We were using Permaset printing inks and we quickly realised that the stiffness of the media mattered. Too stiff and the roller ran out of ink too quickly, getting noticeably paler on each rotation, as you can see in the top left of the photo above. A runnier medium worked a lot better and we also got interesting results by spritzing the rollers with a spray bottle after inking.










We weren't trying to ensure exact registration or anything - just seeing what kind of marks we could get from these objects. But even without that, we were pretty impressed! These are successive rows with the same roller, to get a overall pattern.

This one was experimenting with different rollers used successively.  That's pretty effective too.

I'd quite like to try using strips of a low-tack tape or other straight edge, to give a consistent width gap between rows. Another day...

All in all, a very worthwhile impulse buy!

And yet more trees...

Remember when I did some spray printing with stencils and some screen printing with thickened dye back in April? Like most printing sessions, it generated a lot of prints (not all of which were entirely wonderful).  But often prints are a starting place for something else.

In my journal, I mounted the paper resists I'd used, which had quite a bit of pattern on then because of the resist already on the screen.

 

I also took one of the prints, that looked like this...

... and worked on it with Inktense pencils until I thought I could do no more.

 

It's still a funny looking tree but it's better!  

 

Making print plates 5

Yes, they do come to an end, I promise! But it was a very productive day...

This was a different kind of plate again. I took craft foam and stitched a chain stitch with embroidery thread. When I was designing it, I was thinking of the ongoing Fibrecircle journal work on Trees.

 

I only took two prints from it so far, but I think this has a lot of possibilities. I printed with a spoon and fingers, hence the obvious finger prints. This was an issue because the plate wasn't mounted and ended to want to move during printing. You can really see this in the second print. I think I need to mount the plate before trying again.

 

I began a second similar plate, but my aim with this one is to create layers of colour, adding more stitch each time, in a sort of reversal of the reduction printing process. I won't start the process until it's mounted.

So yes, somewhere down the track... My priority at present is to finish my main work for the untethered exhibition out of hand in November, so serious printing time has been eaten up by stitching time. It's quite contemplative... but not yet anything I can show.

Making print plates 4

The fourth plate I made was a fairly basic kind of collagraphs, the kind we probably all made as students! I used cardboard, cork sheet and self-adhesive foam letters to make a marine ply plate covered in letters. I wanted to see whether the different surfaces printed in interesting ways. Like many other textile artists, I like including text and lettering in my work, so this plate was made with a specific context in mind.

I did three test prints with Permaset inks on cartridge paper. Although the plate was sealed, the sealing clearly wasn't adequate, so the plate, especially the cardboard, gradually disintegrated. The foam letters were also ink-greedy, as you'd expect.

 

I actually don't mind the final plate, which I'll seal again for future printing. I like the way there are gaps and partial letters. I may make more partial letters with cork sheet, as I like the speckly texture it gives.

 

This is one you'll definitely see again!

Making print plates 3

At our playday last month, we were trying out a new medium from Derivan Matisse called Medium 37. This is a high gloss self levelling pouring medium about the consistency of pouring cream. After watching a few videos, I thought we might try using it to create a low-relief print plate by trickling it over the surface of marine ply and allowing it to dry in interesting shapes.

Wet medium

Dry plate

As you can see, it was really a bit too runny for that purpose, though it didn't spread out to cover the whole board.

My only print so far was with acrylic paint. I thought the tackiness of it might work with this fairly slippery surface.

 

 

 

 

I did get some interesting marks, which make me feel the plate has promise for general patterning on paper. But it was a dry day and, even with retarder added, the acrylics were a bit quick to dry. I was being lazy, not getting out the printing inks, and it shows.

I have some ideas for using this plate, so I expect you'll see it again! 

Making print plates 2

My second and third plates were made without the press, using the same principle. I used foam meat tray instead of foam core, as it's softer, and impressed a leaf into it with the marble rolling pin. It's not a deep impression, as the leaves were fragile and softer than most of the materials I used on the foam core plate.

 

I printed it with my baren and black Permaset printing inks. Of the four prints, two were pretty ordinary - you may see them later as I do different things with them. But there were two that I liked. The left one was inked and then wiped back heavily; the right one was just a straight print.





I really like these and they're going into my Fibrecircle Trees book.

Making print plates 1

A few weeks ago, I had a playday with my friend Claire, making printing plates of various kinds. She brought along her little press, which was fun to worth with, although we didn't actually get time to print with it. But it didn't go unused!

The first print plates were made using the press. We had some various weights of foam core board to experiment with. The idea was to lay firm items on the foam core and run it through the press to create impressions in the board.

Here's one that Claire did, about to go through the press.

This was my print plate which was made with string, mesh and other disparate objects. I added some drawn elements into the foam core, to emphasise the shapes emerging, which were vaguely reminiscent of a pond scene.

 

I printed the plate with black Permaset printing inks on cartridge paper, using by turns my baren, a spoon and fingers. This is the best of the half-dozen prints:

 

 

Nothing special, huh? I found that the water-based printing inks really didn't much like the shiny surface of the foam core - I think oil-based inks print better but I choose not to use them. It's also pretty clear to me that this kind of print plate really needs a press to work successfully. Better paper would help but I wasn't going to waste my little stash of good paper, if I couldn't get a better test print than this on cartridge paper.

 

A few days later, I did a second set of prints using my marble rolling pin. I like this method on small prints, as it allows for fairly even pressure over the surface of the plate, akin to small press printing. Sometimes I get really great results.

I deliberately chose some printing ink that was ever so slightly stiff, as I thought that might help with the tack problems on the foam core. It really didn't improve matters so I wasn't getting good coverage on the plate.  But it did give me some interesting results. I quite like this one, as it looks a bit misty. I have a few of these misty ones, so I might experiment with other techniques to work on them further.

 

I kept experimenting with the tackiness of the medium as I continued printing. I did get some prints with better coverage, although they are paler due to the addition of base medium and water.

 

After I'd been printing for a while, I went too far with the medium, made it a bit too runny and really over-inked the plate. I did several pulls to clean it. However, that actually worked in my favour. How often have I decided printing really isn't working out today, only to do a couple of final pulls that make it all worthwhile?

 

This is the second print from the over-inked plate...

 
... and this is a monotype from the first print from the plate, which looked like a completely blue page, with no details at all. (That's why it's reversed compared to all the others.)

 

 I really like these as prints. The runny inks have given them a texture and depth that was mostly lacking in the other prints. Not especially like the plate but interesting.

 

I've done some stuff with some of the other prints from this plate, which I'll post about after I finish talking about the other plates I made.

 

You can see Claire's much better results on one of her foam core plates, using oil-based inks, on her blog.



Spray dyeing with the Fibrecircle group

paper stencil

These posts are a bit out of order here, as I actually did this before  my playday with Claire. It also wasn't dyeing - we were using Dala Sun Colors, which seem to fall somewhere between fabric paints and dyes. But the principle was the same.

You can read all about it on the Fibrecircle blog. Suffice it to say it was the same technique as with Claire, but I focused mostly on my paper stencils, which I had coated with Gesso to give them some heft. They were (surprise surprise!) trees. They were also experiments for the untethered piece, as I think I will probably use this technique using coated paper as stencils.

paper stencil positive and negative

This was printed over one of the thickened dye prints I did with Maz a few weeks ago. The left one is just a straight stencil; the right, rather messy one is a negative, then a positive over the top.

More weird looking trees...

This one is a print with the stencil turned over and printed from immediately. The media is really a bit wet for that. Of course, if I'd been really on the ball, I would have sprayed a different colour through the stencil while it was face down! Another good idea I had too late...

This one is a glue gun stencil - not very successful as it's small, which made it very floppy and hard to use.

This is my favourite from the day - done with a commercial stencil.

I always like layers!

Plenty of things to put in my tree book, anyway, even if God wouldn't recognise them as belonging to the plant world! And I found the gessoed paper stencils were robust enough for about seven or eight prints with this very wet media before starting to get a bit soggy, so I should be able to print my fewer prints for untethered with less runny media. Big win!