Solarplate intensive, relief, part II

First, some pretty flowers. This was from a clip art book:



(Technical details on the flower plate/print are all the same as for the plate below.)

Yesterday, it felt like spring here—it was warm and dry, and I was stuck inside learning how to do webforms using php. Today, I'm done with that, and it's cold and wet, just like how it's supposed to be in the middle of January.

So anyhow, again, this was made as a relief plate; paper was Rives Lightweight, printed dry. Plate on the print bed and paper on top. Printed through an etching press w/ very little pressure and no blanket, just a cardboard. Pretty much the same set up as the last entry, just the paper is different.

Now, this is the same plate as from the last entry, but printed on Rives Lightweight dry. The details from both entries are all showing the same areas, so you can open up two windows and look at both at the same time and compare.



Detail 1:



Detail 2:



Detail 3:



Looks like the text printed much better than the solids, and there's less of the movement on the edges that you can detect. That would make sense as well, since the paper is slightly thinner, and I'm pretty sure we did not change the pressure on the press, so there was less pressure that would move the paper in that direction. Also, the paper is dry, so the ink isn't going to spread as much.

OK, now I'm all caught up on the solarplate documentation!

Solarplate intensive, relief, part I

There are lots of pictures to show, so I'm breaking them up into two.

The plate was made as a relief plate; paper was BFK, dampened; printed through the etching press w/ little pressure, no blankets, just a cardboard. We tried both plate on the print bed and paper on top, and paper on the print bed and plate on top. This was printed with the plate on the print bed and paper on top.

So this plate was just lines of different thicknesses and text at different fonts and sizes:



Detail 1—look at how the 0.1 pt line wiggled around! The 0.5 pt line also has a bit of trouble:



Detail 2—8 pt line, a lot better. You can click on the images to see larger views:



Detail 3— good view of a solid area:



The edges are all definitely moving around some for everything—text, solids, and lines. I'm going to guess that's mostly due to how we're printing them—through the etching press with a cardboard on top. I can picture in my head how the way the roller moves across at a very slight pressure would create a subtle movement. And notice that the soft edges are mostly on one side of the solid lines in detail 2 & 3 above! So my guess is that if I were to mount this type high and print it letterpress, I wouldn't see those wiggly edges on the bottom of the thick lines and the square.

Solarplate intensive, etching

OK, I was not very good about documenting my solarplate intensive. So Barbara Mason and I met two more times, once to run more etching tests, and once to run some relief print tests. Here are some of the etching tests.

These are 7” long test strips. If you click on the image you will get larger images. The left was created with a sheet of mylar that had been painted with acrylic (black) mixed with matte medium for various degrees of transparency/opacity. The right is a b&w copy of a color gouache painting.



This next image was from a 5”x7” plate (exposed from a b&w copy of a color gouache painting) that was printed twice. Once with a reddish brown, and again with the plate rotated 180 deg in black (I think?).



Ignore the stripe down the middle...have I mentioned how much I hate my all-in-one-printer-scanner before? This was from a b&w copy of a pencil sketch. This is printed just once through the press—I wiped the plate as normal for an etching (with water based ink), and on top of that Barbara rolled an oil based ink on with a brayer. Since oil and water don't mix, she does not pick up the water based ink on the brayer and she can edition without having to clean up the brayer in between each print (tricky)!



Another sketch from my sketch book, only this plate got wet in the upper right corner before we exposed it. We went on to expose, wash, harden and print anyhow, just so I can see what happens. So that's what happens. A big blotch. The gray squarish areas are from my original—this was from my sketch book so those are the pages/corners you see. (The sketch is based on a Persian miniature.)



One last etching. Again, a b&w sketch from my sketch book. Made the same way as the sprouted potato above. Horizontal line from my scanner...have I mentioned...



Next up, the relief plates, tomorrow.

Solarplate intensive with Barbara Mason

This is a 5"x7" test solarplate intaglio printed on Rives Lightweight. The yellow stripe down towards the left is from the scanner (I despise this all-in-one scanner/printer/copier).

I got a RACC Professional Development grant to do 20 hours with Barbara Mason, and today was my first session. For the first session, I prepared several tests—

1. The above, which is collection of various line thicknesses from 0.5pt to 20pt, various fonts (serif, sans serif, italics, etc) at different sizes, ultra fine sharpie, fine sharpie, black oil pastel, brown oil pastel and gray oil pastel.

2. A sheet of mylar painted with ivory black at different density levels. We test printed just a small strip of this.

3. A sheet of mylar painted with an image in bone black (which is more transparent than ivory black). But this was NOT dry after 12 hours, so we did not test this today.

3. A high contrast photograph. We did not test this today, as the laser printer output showed a visible grid, which would image on the solarplate.

4. A low contrast photograph. We test printed just a small strip of this.

5. A B&W positive and negative of a painting. We test printed one of these, although I don't remember which.

Here are a couple of details. Again, the yellow stripe is from the scanner.

I'm pretty sure the fuzziness is from the wiping (this is intaglio and not relief printed). The Rives Lightweight gave the 'cleanest' print as far as the fine lines and texts go. Rives BFK was a little fuzzier (both of these were printed dampened). The Arches 88, printed dry, gave the fuzziest result. Although, both the Lightweight and the BFK showed the slight 'woven' pattern that is visible on the backs of these papers when unprinted, ie, the 'weave' became visible on the front of the paper in the print. And the ultra fine sharpie is barely visible at all.



I love the lines drawn with the oil pastels!



We're scheduled to meet next on Sunday, that will give me a chance to create a few images to print for real (rather than just tests). I'm thinking that I will do intaglio for the first half, and then relief for the 2nd half. I'll be trying the relief plates on the letterpress and also the sign printer that Catherine loaned me. (Yes, I just have all kinds of presses here, on loan from other artists!)

Seasons & projects in transition

Along with summer, several projects are now wrapping up (or have wrapped up):

Roof, check.

Gutter, check.

Studio remodel, mostly check. I still need to paint the other half.

Write Around Portland broadside, check. Diane and I printed the colophons today, so we're done. They're just missing signatures and numbers at this point.

And I'm ready to start on some of my 7x7 pieces—I mounted paper on 6 panels today. I'm planning to mount paper as needed as I go along, rather than mounting all 30 of them right away. In case I get other ideas for what I want to do with them.

The struggle may (or may not) be over

So there it is, the text printed, the leaves printed. I'm not sure that I'm so happy about it. It took me three ink mixes before I found the right color for the darker color of the leaves. I wanted the colors to move, ie, to not be so perfectly registered, so that the leaves looked like they were quaking in the wind. I don't think I like the result though.

So I made 2 more screens today, to give the leaves a bit more definition, and after printing up a few more, I decided I liked that even less. So here I am, leaving well enough alone, for now. See this entry for where it was before I added the text and the darker color of the leaves.

Now I'm back to finish prepping my 7x7 boards.

We have progress on the broadside

After printing my first pressure print layer on the letterpress at Diane's last Wednesday, it took me 3 tries before I had a plate that I was happy with for the 2nd layer. In the process, I completely destroyed the plate for the 1st layer, so that's officially cancelled.

My first attempt, using pva on cardstock, buckled the paper. My 2nd attempt, again pva on cardstock only this time I pressed it between release paper under bricks, I tried to lift up the release paper a bit too early and completely peeled off a layer of the paper. The 3rd time, I left it under bricks for overnight and that was ok.

I printed this layer at home, and had a heck of a time achieving any kind of a control over the situation. Everytime I changed the packing, things changed in ways totally different from what I was expecting. Everytime I inked up (with very little ink), the next print got way darker, and then 2 prints later, it seemed like I needed to ink up again.

I went through my 56 sheets of paper and it wasn't clear to me that I was going to get 40 good prints for the edition. But at this point, I really can't start over again.

I took a break from the broadside on Sunday, then on Monday I added the leaves and the white in the bark. So now there are 2 layers of pressure print on the letterpress (1st layer—gray & yellow background, 2nd layer—blue & orange over that), 2 layers on the gocco (the leaves & the bark).



Today, I looked at the bark and decided it needed to go white still, so there are now 2 layers of white over the bark, and here I'm printing the gray areas in the tree bark. The paper size measures 20"x13", so it's hanging over the edges of the gocco.



Now this is 2 layers of pressure print and 4 layers of gocco. I still have the text, patterns over the leaves, and maybe a rabbit to print.



The print is too large to dry on my drying racks, and I do like seeing them all lined up like this:

The first layer of the broadside

After a few days of proofing the plate, I finally printed it at Diane's last night. I had never done rainbow rolls before, so I thought it best to have some supervision. I made some potstickers and we had a potluck at her place with her family. The potstickers were a huge hit with the kids. After dinner, we went to work.

So here's the final version of the paper plate for this first layer. This is a single sheet of cardstock (probably 80lb cardstock) that I have either cut out some shapes or removed layers of the paper from it (without making big holes).



And here's the printed result. Pressure printing is just so incredibly sensitive. The image is completely created by the various thicknesses throughout the single sheet of cardstock.



I have yet to make the plate for the 2nd layer, but I hope to do that tomorrow.

The roofers finished putting on the new roof this afternoon. The garage (where the letterpress is) had to be cleaned up (again) before I can use it again. There was debris everywhere. So now it's beautiful and pristine (on my side at least, we're not looking at the Good Prince's side).

Pressure print, day 3

I'm getting warmer still. Here I'm peeling off more layers of paper. You can see the hawk shape in the lower left corner of the paper:



With the light shining through it, you can see the different thicknesses in the parts of the image:



And here's the result. I think I must've worked on the plate more after I took the photo above.



I had a hard time getting a completely even print. I printed just the solid block many times, trying to get all the unevenness worked out, but never really could. So I just went with it.

Since making this proof, I've removed even more paper from the plate. Although, I'm thinking, there must be an easier way to print this. And I'm hoping that the plate will last though the print run of 50.

Pressure print, on my own

Hey, things are moving right along. I got the MDF, the plexi, adhered the plexi to the MDF using Duromount, which worked beautifully. Here is the base set up in the print bed:



I prepared the plate using the cardstock I got from Diane. The cutouts are the leaves in the mockup. (Picture of mockup in this entry.) You can't see, but the backside of the cardstock had been scrapped in the places where I want the ink to gradually fade to white. And after phone conferences with Diane & Andrew (during a layover in SLC) to make sure I've got everything correct in my head, I went to work.



The print. Obviously, I have not achieved the fade to white, but I'm getting there—you can vaguely make out the shape of the hawk's shadow on the bottom right. And that's done just by removing a layer of the cardstock from the back, leaving the hawk shape intact. The middle of the tree trunk is also supposed to go to white, and I can see a slight difference. More paper removal and experimenting is necessary, but I'm a lot closer than I was yesterday. I'm also a lot more tired. Running the letterpress is physically much harder work, although you're not bent over the press like you do with the gocco, so at least my back doesn't hurt.



I do have a couple of problems that will need conferring with Diane or Andrew, but hopefully, by Wednesday, I'd be printing and not just experimenting.

Pressure print, lesson 1

Oy! That went badly. My mylar painted with medium was way too thick, and I was surprised at how much it embossed the paper. And it made an impression on Diane's tympan too, which of course is always bad. Given that the medium feels soft to the touch, I didn't expect that.

Every little brush stroke was visible, which actually was ok for certain parts of the print, but really wasn't what I was after. Also, the mylar was pretty hard to work with, so Diane gave me a parent sheet of the cardstock so I can redo the image.

We scheduled another session for next Tuesday to try my next iteration, but I'm now thinking that I can't really wait until then, I'm running out of time. So I've cleaned up Andrew's press, turned it on and played around with it a bit. I'll need to get the MDF & plexi to get it set up to do the pressure printing, so it might be Sunday before I can try it, but that's still two more days ahead of my current schedule.

Well, I wasn't supposed to be here...

Earlier this year, the Saturn's wipers started acting funny. So in June, I took it in and it got a brand new wiper motor. A couple of weeks later, when I had to use the wipers coming back from The Dalles, it was still acting funny. So I took it in again on Monday. They still saw nothing wrong with it, but replaced the then still new motor with yet another new motor.

On Tuesday evening, I started down I-5 heading towards Bend. As you Portlanders might recall, it was raining that evening. I got maybe 2 or 3 miles down the road when the wipers went kaput all together. Now, that was NOT funny. It was dusk, not the best visibility, and I had no wipers in the rain.

So on Wednesday morning, the tow truck arrived and the Saturn went into the shop again. Wednesday afternoon, the shop called and said they don't find anything wrong with the car except the 2nd new motor is most definitely dead, so they're going to give me ANOTHER new motor. Except now I've run them out of motors and they'll have to have one shipped to them.

Well, now, that is not a very satisfactory answer! And I told them so. What are the chances that I'd have 3 bum motors in a row? Me think the car is killing the motors. But apparently, they find nothing wrong with the car.

This is now Thursday night, and I've not heard from them again. Did the 3rd new motor not show up? Did it show up and then died immediately upon meeting the car? What?

So rather than spending 3 days away visiting family in Bend and Hines, I found myself here and trying to get my brain to focus on work that I hadn't planned on doing for a few days.

Write Around Portland

First thing first, this is my very next deadline, the broadside for Write Around Portland. (This is the mockup.) After talking to Carla, the organizer, I found out that although some component(s) of the broadside needs to be printed on the letterpress, it need not be the text part. This makes a huge difference in terms of how I can do the text. So I'm doing all the text wrapped around the tree trunk, and I'm doing the background (the gray on the right, the hawk shadow, and the orange on the left) as pressure prints on the letterpress.



Here is the texture that will go under the paper to create the pressure print. The hawk shadow is cut out in fun foam with the edges feathered and layered (haha, but you know, like haircuts). The rest of the texture is matte medium applied to mylar in varying thicknesses, which will hopefully create varying density of the background color. Not having pressure printed before, Diane will be helping me with this tomorrow. The mylar is sitting on a sheet of newsprint, so where there is no matte medium, you see the yellow newsprint underneath, and that part will not print. Where it's white is where there's matte medium, and that will print, we hope.



On the Relay Replay book

I was able to meet one of my senior's children this week when he came out to visit his dad. We had a very good couple of hours at the coffee shop. He told me about their lives together a bit, and I told him about the concepts that I've been working with. He seemed happy with the directions that I've been exploring, and promises to get me some water from the St. Claire River to include in the book!

And OK, I can't help it, I'm really liking the darker window frame with the orange highlight. Here's a shot from the day time.

Ah...much better!

I painted the front of the window frame (the parts that face the room) a darker shade of purply red (left-over from another project), and it's 100% better:



Before, the orange window just commanded all your attention (well, all my attention anyhow) whenever I was in the room. Now it's much more civilized.

On the broadside

I've been mocking up my Write Around Portland broadside. Despite not wanting to take the extra time to mail-order my paper, I ended up mail-ordering it anyhow, because the Rives Lightweight at the local store is, as usual, all creased up. They really have trouble keeping that paper flat & crease-free. So now it will be the middle of next week before I have my paper, and I'd be gone then. So realistically, I won't be able to start printing until the week after. That's still enough time, so that's good.

Here's the mockup. There's a lot more text. I'm playing around adding some of the text like they're the patterns on the Aspen tree trunk. I'm not sure that I'll do it the way I've started it here; I might just do it to suggest the volume of the trunk instead.

Write Around Portland

A couple of months back, I was invited to print a broadside for Write Around Portland. I was thrilled to be invited and happily accepted. I was given a selection of 9 short pieces written by participants in Write Around Portland and I was to choose one to print. I liked many of the pieces and selecting one was difficult, but I ended up choosing A Shift in Focus. I don't have permission to excerpt it here, I'm sure, so I'll just say that the way she talked about how "...everything looked the same..." and then realizing that "the shift was inside me..." really resonated with me.

I finally started sketching out some ideas this afternoon, doing some research on images, etc.

More about the studio remodeling

The floor installer called today, and it was a good thing I wasn't planning on waiting for the floor before I started painting, since they're not going to install until August 1, a whole week away. If I paint now, I can be back to work by Monday, August 3. If I wait until after, I'd be out of commission for another 3-4 days after that. And I do need to start working on the broadside soon. It's due on Sept 4.

So here are the painted bi-fold doors installed. The green is actually much paler and not so minty green. The name of the color is called Avocado Essence, although it's not quite as yellow as I think of avocado colors.

Relay Replay fundraiser print

After a couple of days of planning, I made the print today. This is the print I'm doing as a fundraiser to raise money to pay for materials and for me to go out and spend a week at The Dalles to work with another senior who lives out that way. His family lives in Portland and they have horses. I went out a few weeks ago and took a bunch of photos of their horses and used those as sources for this print. [I should add that these are Gocco prints, but of course...]

Here's the first layer, basically a solid 6"x6" square with different areas inked up with what I have left of the watercolor inks. The white horse was blocked out with a self-adhesive stencil:



After the 2nd layer:



And as I was designing it, I really couldn't decide which version to go with, so I went with both:



I printed about 2/3 of the prints in the pastel color version, and the rest in the sepia toned version. Both prints have that old-fashioned look, which I'm really liking. I used the same two screens for both versions, one screen a solid 6"x6" area, and a second screen for the darker lines. I like that the solid is somewhat spotchy too. I decided to go with the splotchy screen rather than a good solid open screen that I have been using for a variety of other projects. I don't know, there's just something about those little bright spots, they look like snow flakes, or maybe flower petals floating through the air.

The design of the print came from these 2 photos. The two horses are a mother-daughter pair.

The money day

I discovered today that the credit union had put my hard earned money from Portland Open Studios weekend into someone else's account! Isn't that special. Well, at least they took care of it pretty quickly. Then it was picking up money from Jeremy for the sale of the 2 violin pieces back in the summer (the buyer only just now paid up), and also giving Jeremy his money for helping me during Portland Open Studios (I pay my help during those weekends). What was funny was that I gave him just a little more (rounded up), and he gave me just a little more, and we pretty much cancelled each other out.

Packed and shipped off the books for the Bainbridge Island book show; packed up the different states of the Trixie print for Marcy, who's doing a display for Print Arts Northwest. Started to pull together some testimonial entries for the Portland Open Studios blog. Debra Carus responded very quickly and with a very positive note, so that's up as the first testimonial entry.

Milestones & breakthroughs

1. I ate chicken feet today. Actually, just 1 foot, and not even the whole thing, just a part of a foot.

We were taken out for dimsum today, and for some reason, after years of thinking how gross chicken feet were (was? it is the name of a dish...), for some reason, I decided to give it a try. I had this idea that I would eat it and suddenly realize what a mistake I had made, that all these years I had been missing some earth shattering experience...well, I have to say that it did not do much for me. It wasn't bad or awful, it just wasn't all that good. I doubt that I'd bother again.

2. The silk road flowers site went live today.

Rebecca finally set up the web hosting yesterday and I uploaded the web site. We still have more to fix up, and I found a couple of problems -- IE 6.xx does not know how to deal with transparent backgrounds in .png files...what a bummer, and I need to check the style sheet, the fonts are a bit screwed up, and it's a common font. We all met at Caffe Uno this afternoon, with Carolyn supplying the laptop, and had a ribbon cutting ceremony -- a real ribbon was involved. For some reason, I still can't see the site here at home (I can see it by entering the ip address directly, but not by the domain name).

3. And pillows it's gonna be for the Tennessee exhibit.

I looked at the images on the CD this afternoon, and there's definitely usable stuff on there. I still have to check out the negatives that they could not scan, and I imagine there will be more things on there I can use too. I'm now really settled on the idea of pillows -- a. I like the idea that it cradles the head, the physical location of our memories, b. I LOVE the idea that memories and sleep are so closely linked, and c. it's a nice book-like structure.

Theresa came by for a visit yesterday; saw the gocco horse print I just finished, and thought of the toy horses that you find hitched up to the sidewalks in Portland! I love that connection! Even though that wasn't my original intention, I think I like her interpretation better. Much better.

Experimental gocco print, day 5

Spent a couple of hours in the afternoon working on the mock-up of the print, trying to figure out what it was about it that I didn't quite like. Took me a while, but I finally figured out the the horse's body needs to be lighter.

So here I've just put down a layer of white. This is still using the same open screen that I've been using all along, with the horse shape cut out of a self adhesive label.



Then I decided it needed to be just a touch whiter, so I hit it again, only this time very quickly and lightly. So this image has "one and half presses" of the white:



Here's the cut out of the horse shape. Cut with an exacto knife.



Then I finally had to flash a whole new screen to print the horse itself! This is the first screen I've had to flash in all these different layers that I've printed. I didn't want it to be black (I thought it would be too stark), but looking at this now, I think it looks rather washed out. So I may need to go back and print black (or at least very dark brown) on top of it. But I'll let it sit for a couple of days first. Both because I want to think about it, and also because I MUST return to work on the flowers web site starting from tomorrow.



So here are about half of the prints drying on the drying rack.



This print has been a complete experiment, and there were lots of mistakes and gotchas, which hopefully I won't make again, at least not too many more times...hah! I think I might get 8 good prints (if even that many) out of the 22 I printed. Of course, if I print another black or dark brown layer over the horse, there might be further reduction in the number of good prints left. We'll see.

Tomorrow, silk road flowers again!

Step 1

...is cutting paper.

I'm finally getting started with my new prints, and of course I haven't a clue yet what I'll be printing. Step 1 is always trimming the paper. Some people hate this part, but I find it quiet and meditative, and gets me in the mood for making prints. I'm hoping to make a couple of new prints to enter into the Middle East exchange that Print Arts Northwest has set up, and that has a particular paper size specified, which is why I'm cutting paper without knowing what I'll be printing. In either case, I'm hoping to do a lot of experimentation anyhow, so there will be lots of unknowns, even after I start printing.

Worked on Rebecca's web site some more, here's an updated mockup of the graphics.

Time flies

And another day flew by. I really, really meant to clean out the printing room today, since I have a visitor tomorrow. But instead, I spent the day working on a couple of web sites (doing some groundwork). What can I say, it's something I do that actually pays! (And I enjoy doing it too.)

The visit is not until 1pm, so I still have the morning to clean up. Reviewed Helen's grant proposal...she's pretty much ready and it looks good. Of course, I haven't worked on mine since the last class, which is now weeks ago! Like I say, time flies. It has been on my list this whole time, same with 'making a new print!'

Hey, actually, an idea that I was proposing to my new web client got rejected (or will likely be rejected tomorrow...she isn't sounding too excited), but I like it enough that it might be a good starting point for a new print.