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!

Missing in action...

Ever have one of those times when you just go, go, go? Yep, that's the story of the last three moths. A combination of visitors, the untethered Group exhibition, a quick trip to Yass and Canberra, and a lot of admin for various part s of my creative life all pushed blogging to the bottom of my list.

However, now things have settled down, I can take a minute to show you my work hanging in the ATASDA untethered Group's exhibition, out of hand, last November.

Wanton, 60cm x 102cm

"Back in the nineteenth century, out of hand girls were labelled “wanton” and sent to reformatory schools. They never escaped that label; it followed them throughout their lives. These days, the concept of someone being wanton seems laughable. Society’s ideas have changed so much. But public labels like this are damaging in any age - degenerate, communist, terrorist, slut – and so many of them apply only to women. They’re used to marginalise and silence people and we shouldn’t meekly accept them.
I’ve loved printmaking since I was a young woman, and I come back to it again and again as a way of expressing ideas and emotions. Recently, I’ve been combining printed cloth with hand stitching. I love the way that hand embroidery becomes part of the cloth, while printing inks sit on the top. The relationship adds a depth and texture to my work. I find printmaking exciting and challenging but hand stitching is meditative and emotionally satisfying."

A twist on an oldie...

Remember when we were kids and, to transfer an image, we used to scribble pencil on the back and draw around it? Easy, eh? I was reading Drawn to Stitch by Gwen Hedley the other day and she used a similar kind of thing to make marks on paper.

Instead of a layer of graphite pencil, she uses a layer of light-coloured chalk pastels with another layer of coloured wax crayons over the top. When you lay a fresh sheet of paper on top and draw on the back with pen, colour transfers to the other sheet.

My first attempt was a tree. (What a surprise!)

Here's the pen drawing side...

...and this is the transfer side. The result, if all goes well, is a positive-negative effect.

However, I learnt there are a few tricks involved. First is not to layer the colour too thickly. What happens is you get transfer but you can't see where it's disappeared from the coloured surface.

I also learnt that you need a distinct difference in tonal value between the chalk pastels and the crayons. My second one (above) had colours that were similar in tone, so the result was fairly ordinary. I think the best results come from using very light chalk pastels and stronger coloured wax crayons.

I'm not sure how useful this technique will be for me, since I don't do much on paper. I wonder whether the same technique would work with fabric crayons and cloth. An experiment for another day!

 

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!

Collagraph prints - taking it further

Remember the collagraphs prints I did back here and here?

I ended up with some prints that were pretty ordinary, as one often does. So I decided to use them as experiments for a technique I've wanted to try for a while.

I started with a leaf print:

Yes, it really is a leaf print, though it's pretty unexciting and you'd be hard pressed to say what was there!

I drew on the print with green beeswax crayon and a wax candle. They are resists , of course, so the areas covered by the wax were protected. Those areas were ones I wanted to stay light. I also expected the areas with the printing ink on them would probably resist taking colour, and that was partly true.

Then I put a wash of blue dye over the surface, using the dyes like ink. Then, when it had dried, I repeated the wax treatment and put a wash of yellow dye over the top. Here's the result...

I really like this! The resists weren't complete, of course, so there is some colour bleed but generally the waxed areas didn't take much colour, as long as I wasn't too heavy-handed with the dye.

I did the same with another very ordinary leaf print.

On this one, I added black beeswax crayon for shadows and drew with the wax candle. Then I gave it a pale turquoise dye wash.

Again, when it was dry, I drew more with the wax candle and added a yellow dye wash.

It looks quite pale here but it worked very well.

The third one was one of the prints from the impression plate. A lot of these prints weren't that exciting but some of them had interesting misty effects that I wanted to exploit.

I added shadows with a dark purple beeswax crayon and covered a lot of the white areas with scribbled candlewax to protect the light areas. Then I gave it a wash with the same pale turquoise as the previous one. The resist effect of the original printing inks was more an issue this time, so the shading gave the original blue some depth.

 

Then I protected some of the blue areas with the candlewax and added a yellow wash.



Don't you love the magic of colour printing?

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!  

 

A few postcards

It just occurred to me that I haven't written here for, literally, years about the fabric postcards I've been making! I am so used to making them that I just don't think to talk about them here. Of course, they appear on the Fibrecircle blog each time. Mostly, anyway!


This rather weird one included some stamped cloth that I made years ago as a sample for another piece of work, inspired by the standing stones at Filitosa in Corsica. I combined it with frayed  cotton fabric on a painted background.

 

This one was based on a painted background with added colour and stitch.

 

 

This one was made with one of the prints from a playday with Claire early this year. We used compressed sponge to create simple shapes to print from. I added colour to one of my prints with Inktense pencils and embellished it with stitch. It's still a pretty weird looking tree..

 

 

I like to use the postcards to try out stuff and make something different from whatever I'm working on at the time.  So they generally end up different each time.