Different Paper

I’m thinking of making this as a scroll inside a book or box so I started to experiment with the structure.

Cartridge paper is far too springy for what I had in mind and for once the internet doesn’t seem to have any helpful suggestions for paper type or weight.

I went looking through my stuff for something more malleable than cartridge, less fragile than tissue and in long enough lengths that I won’t have to piece it.
I found interfacing...

(it takes the ink much better than I thought but needs a backing paper to read clearly. Probably not what I need for this project but definitely something to come back to)

...and rice paper from a long ago experiment with Chinese calligraphy.

I thought the lack of size in the paper might be a problem with such a wet process but it seems OK. 

Next step 4 colours, and trying to print with a master and on paper that are both too long for the press bed.

There’s been a murrderrr....

The past two Fridays the drama group has been putting on Four Weddings at a Funeral - a murder mystery, so I haven’t quite finished etching the large plate but I have got it ready to go into the copper sulphate for the first line etch next week.

I’ve also been working on the artwork for a new book. The image will be 6 x 80cm. I’ve produced two versions, one to print using the inkjet printer and another to try printing in sections as a gum arabic transfer.

This is a small section of the image for the inkjet.

Small Etching

I've tried another mock up of the book using a scan of the tonal painting

 I've also tried the last section of the drawing as an etching and I think it’s OK.

I have a plate that’s 42 x 15 cm. On Friday I’m going to go for it! I can always go to Plan B (or should that be D for digital?) if it doesn’t work.

New Ideas

I’ve started playing with ideas for a new book.

I started by thinking about simple folds, considering cloisters and frescos (and I will return to this later)

I’m not sure why, but this structure got me thinking about the work of Patrick Hughes. I wondered if I could translate the idea of playing with perspective and making the images appear to move at a smaller scale in book form.  

I tried a mock up and it seems to work

I’ve developed the drawing and done a tonal study at the right size.

I’m not sure if I want to work it up as painting and digitally print the image or if I want to etch it. The next step is to try etching a section before I make up my mind.

Third Time Lucky

I thought I'd replicate the gum arabic transfer butterfly plates (so I could keep the originals to compare to) and then work into them to see how I could push them. It took three goes in three different copper sulphate solutions before they would bite and when they did take the finish was nothing like as good as before.

Next time in the studio I thought I’d try again. Different image but still gum arabic transfer. It bit straight away. I was so overwhelmed I left it in the solution for far too long. It prints mainly black with just a little detail managing to show through in parts. I think I can use it to practice scraping and burnishing on, a sort of mezzotint.

Finally on Friday I decided to try traditional hard ground resist and stop out. It needs working on but I'm finally getting somewhere.

I’ve now got several plates to work into and I’m still determined to nail gum arabic transfer as a resist

I’ve also spent large periods of time over the last two or three weeks glued to a computer. I now have a website up and running.

Spoiler Alert

If you are taking part in the book swop Artist Books 3.0 #17 (CoLours/FolDing/ReCycling) - you might want to leave the page but if you are not....

 I finally finished cutting, folding, stitching and sticking. 

 This edition is named after the Hungarian map fold that I used as part of the structure. 

A brief pause

It’s been a bit quiet on the making front recently.

The follow up to the previous gum arabic prints didn’t take. They took several immersions in 3 different solutions to make them etch and then they seem to have bitten very patchily. ( I'll print them and work into them when I go to Salford at the end of the week.)

Then life got in the way

Our drama group put on Treasure Island at the end of April, the final run up to a performance always takes up a  lot of time.

After which we went to Florence for a week, I carried a load of sketching stuff with me but ended up just wandering and looking.

 I’m hooked, can’t wait to go back.

Gum Arabic and Etching

Last weekend I went on a course to learn about etching copper using ferric sulphide. Although I didn’t produce anything worth showing it did make me want to start etching again. Using these materials means quite long bite time and at the moment I only get two or three hours a week at Hot Bed Press so I decided to revisit aluminium and copper sulphate etching. It’s quick biting and the plus side of the granular nature of aluminium means it doesn’t need an aquatint for tonal work. (The minus side means it’s not as sharp as copper but you can’t have everything)

For a long time I’ve wanted to incorporate text in my work. I’m probably not going to start using letterpress (though the process and feel of it does intrigue me) so etching seems like a good avenue to explore.

I’ve used Press n Peel in the past to apply text printed on a laser printer as a resist but it sets very hard on the plate and is difficult to remove. This means it isn’t easy to work into the plate after application. It's also expensive. A while back I'd read about using gum arabic transfer to produce a resist on metal so thought I’d have a go.

First a gum arabic print just to check that the materials and methods would work on paper.

Next printing onto plate

 The etched plates

And finally the prints

It needs refining. I left the dark text plate in the gloop a bit too long so it started to eat through the resist and even though you can print gum arabic onto paper using a tonal image the metal plate needs strong black and white contrast to etch properly but I’m looking forward to pushing this further.

Mainly collagraphs and books.

What happened to March?

Well, I’ve been experimenting with different materials to see what new effects I could get. Given my interest in buildings as a motif I’ve been looking at trying out stuff for stonework.

Tile cement works well when you want a dark wall but I’m trying to combine my collagraph plates with monoprints. I needed something that would hold line and some textural marks but not be too dark overall so that the underlying colour would show through.

I’ve ended up with the plain mountboard for dressed stone and acrylic paint for the rougher textured walls. The plate needed areas of selected varnishing (rather than just straightforward coats applied over the whole areas) as the painted areas needed a lot less varnish than the other parts of the print.

I also signed up for the next book swop.  The brief is “Recycled/ Folded/ Colour”(any or a combination of the three - so far I don't think I'm using colour), A6, any appropriate structure. I’ve been working through ideas.

I came up with several that I liked including a shell like book and a book that opens on all four sides of the cover (it’s so simple I’m sure someone else must have done this but I don’t remember seeing it anywhere). The problem was they worked well in the roughs at a small scale but at the right size in the paper I wanted to use they were too floppy to support themselves.

 I will return to these books later but for this edition I have decided to combine Hungarian map folds with a folded accordion structure. I’m using hard backed books from the charity shop for the covers and most of the paper and adding pages made of recycled tissue paper that I have used between prints when drying under pressure.

The design still needs tweaking, I need to work out how to close it, what end papers and how to seal the edges of the cover boards. No art work to do but an awful lot of folding, sewing and sticking.

Revisiting Rapunzell

I started this blog in 2011 to record contributing to Book Art Object. One of the books I produced for this was in response to the title ‘Rapunzell’.

Initially I had wanted to make the image for this book as a collagraph but my printmaking skills weren’t up to it so reluctantly I rethought and developed it digitally. 

Last month I decided to revisit and revise the original drawings to try collagraph again.  I’m really pleased with how it turned out this time.