ART!

This week I've been printing. On Monday night I dragged Tom in with me. He got carried away with his camera while I worked. These are some of his pictures.

These are the springs of the press I was working on.
The intaglio press room.

Ink draw downs that show the colours we have.
This piece of marble is next to the hot plate. It helps the plates cool faster. For my entire time in the studio I have always wondered why it had such a strange top edge. There is an odd curve on the left side. It was not until this year that it occurred to me that this was actually meant to be a tombstone.
I had to etch some photo plates. This is me rinsing the acid off them.
Th purple stuff is the photo polymer. It is photo sensitive and allows us to expose images on to a copper plate. This image is of coral and a castle under water. Now that I'm done etching it I'm scrubbing the polymer off.

I talk Tom into taking pictures of me in various stages of printing. Here I'm carding ink on to my plate.

Next I take a course cheese cloth-like fabric and wipe off the extra ink.


Then I finish it off with a polish, here I'm using canary paper. It's tracing paper for architects. Then I wipe the edges and place the plate on the press.

To help me line up the image in the same place every time I have some guide lines marked on the mayfair paper under the acetate.

For this print I'm also doing some chin colle. Which is a technique where you glue another paper, usually a thin Japanese paper, to the larger sheet. I've decided that I want the image on the paper so I'm doing it at the same time that I print. These are my pieces of colle paper, I've brushed a glue on the back and let it dry. This process makes the paper into a stamp. We soak our printing paper so it is more flexable and it also dampens the colle paper causing them to be glued together.
Laying the colle paper on to the plate.



Running it through the press.

The finished print. The colle paper serves as a second colour and texture in the image.


This is my wallpaper screen print. Tom is in this one to help give a sense of scale. Each panel is about 7ft long.





The dark line in the right of the image it the edge of two of the panels. I've printed them so that they match up.
I used the screen with the image to print some t-shirts as well. They turned out really well but no pictures of them at the moment.