One step forwards....

Although work on it has slowed down since term started 'Where the Dead Live' is making progress.
I've made another batch of pringles (if in doubt start squishing paper!) and printed another set of etched pages.

I also finished the scanning for Rapunzel and put the textures into the image last week so I thought I'd print out the final artwork and start to put it all together. I'd decided to laser print the whole edition as the test pieces and mock up I did before the holidays (using found textures) worked well even though they weren't the right colours.

All the decisions have been made and this was meant to be the easy part. The printouts looked great. The colours and the textures worked well together. The dark  had a rich leather-like feel to it. But.....

when I started to fold the prints the ink started to flake off leaving white paper showing through

It doesn't look worn and in keeping with the subject it just looks tatty.

I thought I'd print it on the inkjet instead. On printing paper it bleeds and the colours are decidedly grubby.

 So I ordered coated inkjet paper. It prints cleanly and the image is sharp but now the printer is resisting all attempts to calibrate it to the monitor and has decided it can improve on my colour scheme.

At the moment it favours custard yellow and something that can only be described as poo brown.

Editioning pages

Although I'm not sure yet how exactly I'm going to construct this book I do want a mixture of printed and mixed media pages. I thought I'd better see how easy it was to print a uniform set of images from two plates onto the handmade paper shapes.
The amount of moisture seems to be critical. Not enough and the image won't print clearly enough, too much and the plate refuses to part with the paper and I end up scraping it off. The differences in thickness between the papers doesn't help when trying to judge this.

But I finally managed 15 of each plus one or two not too mangled ones that I can experiment with.

Etching experiments

Over the past two weeks I’ve been experimenting with etching onto the ’pringles.’

 I find cemeteries and graveyards fascinating so I’ve been looking through my collection of inscriptions on gravestones for these images. 

I started with Charles Morelli. I found this enamal and wrought iron grave marker in a cemetery in Argeles-sur-Mer. I can’t find out what type of artist he was or how he died ‘accidentally’. His wife lived to be 87, dying in 1952.

 I made the images on the plates bigger than the edges of the oval as the handmade paper isn’t completely uniform and each one spreads slightly differently when it goes through the press

I followed this up with Jannet  Johnstone. I found this stone in a cemetery on Orkney. I l really liked the form of the lettering incised into the stone and the very simple imagery carved in a shallow relief. 

I tried to use the lettering and the view from the cemetery; it looked straight out over the sea. A beautiful but bleak landscape.

Unfortunately when I transferred the design to the plate the tones didn’t differentiate as well as on the PC screen so it wasn’t very legible.

I decided instead to use some of the very simple shapes from the gravestone behind the lettering.

 

The images transfer to the handmade paper but the paper does tend to stick to the plate. This could be a problem when trying to edition it.