Butterflies and Shells

As part of my attempts to put hand printed text into my books I have gone back to exploring gum arabic printing.

I started playing with images, two of my husband’s ancestors combined with clocks and butterflies, to relearn the techniques and explore registration

 The butterflies look too cut out next to the figures and I should have  introduced more contrast into the images before printing them with the laser printer.

I do like the ghost that has printed from the paper onto the second printing plate. 

These were made by overprinting colours on plates that were printouts of a black and white image

The next step was to try colour separation and text. I put Ariel’s song onto some images of shells that I made a while ago. I used a cmyk separation to print the plates.

Spot the not so deliberate mistake.This was printed with prussian blue, burnt umber and yellow
ochre litho ink

Next session at HBP I explored process coloured etching inks with cmyk separations.

I'm happy with the registration and printing now I need to go back to the drawing board and work out the images to go with the words I want to put in the book.