Printing

Things are ticking over slowly. I’ve made a plate from the drawing of the fools in a cage 

 and printed it.

 

 I struggled with the mountboard that I used for the plate. It was stuff I got in a hurry at the beginning of lockdown, not my usual sort and it needed peeling much deeper to get to the rough internal core I need for the darks. This made a step on the plate that was a bit too much for my small press at home to deal with, leaving some white haloing in parts. I may try on the big press at Hot Bed when we can return.

The chair of our book art group is currently making a video for BABE about our group project “An inch a day” and the difficulties of making a group project (which will be about 90 feet long) when we cannot meet up to work together.

This spurred me to trying to make some relevant images for it. As a warm up up I tried monoprint.

Trace monoprints

 Stencils 

 And dark field monoprints. 

 All tacked onto a sample of the book base fabric. All made using an X cut (die cutting Machine). I was amazed how well they worked and this will be a much simpler and quicker process than the collagraph plates I had envisaged making.

(Does anyone know why new blogger keeps randomly altering my typeface?)

Moving into the new year

My puppets are slowly developing into print. I've got the first block drawn out ready to start working into.

While I was doing that I had some ideas for the words for the slotted tab book that I was working on before Christmas. 

The words impose a structure because they have to be revealed in the right order, but I still want the feel of meandering, not straight forward page turning, while reading it. I also want it to look like a section of maze when it is opened out.
 

This is a mock up which uses the slot and tab and the woven paper joinings that I have been exploring recently. Now I need to work on the imagery and refine the text.