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?)