Preliminary Printing Tests

Getting away from purely making paper, this week I have moved onto the printmaking side of things. I continued with my theme of using Heisenberg from Breaking Bad as subject for my prints. For the following print I decided to do a dry point etching because I've only done it once before and felt I needed to play around with it further. This time I was a lot more delicate and precise with my strokes and I tried to do variable toning by using harder and lighter cuts depending on what was needed. I'm really happy with how my print turned out and even more so with the effect it had on my own handmade paper. I tried keeping strokes consistent throughout the etching so that it didn't look messy and on the fly.

Today as I collected these prints from the drying rack, I was sticking other variations into my sketchbook and wondered what else I could do with it. I then decided I wanted to try and do a linoleum print to compliment the etching. The TV show Breaking Bad is primarily based around the empire of blue Methamphetamine, so I wanted a background that would symbolize that. I decided to go with a cracked background which also gave colour to the portrait too. I cut and printed these in fairly quick time, I just need to wait for them to dry so that I can re-print my etching over the top of them. I'm looking forward to the effects!

On a final note, my 3D shapes that I made last week were finally dry! I was able to pop them out of the cookie cutters and get a real look at them. Unfortunately, I had not considered air bubbles to be a problem with the pulp, so that left some gaps which made some of the shapes crumble and break apart. Lesson learned. I am now looking into buying cookie cutters that have some sort of press, so that I can compress my pulp and remove more water and more importantly, air. This will lead to a more solid result and increase drying time...I hope.

Potpourri Paper Printing!

Last week I took a risk with paper making and decided to see what would happen if I used Potpourri as a base for pulp. It was a welcome change from the usual stuff we have been doing previously as I didn't know what to expect.

The Potpourri I used was a lime variety and similar in appearance to what you see below (except green). The first thing I had to do when take it out of it's packaging, was to break it down. I did this by wrapping handfuls in a cloth and then using a rolling pin to hammer the different objects into smaller pieces. I had to do this several times in order for the potpourri to be suitable to go in the blender.

When that was done, I started to soak the potpourri pieces in water and to my surprise, they started to foam! The chemicals or perfume that had been absorbed by the dried objects had started to seep out again and I found it very difficult to see a positive outcome with what I currently had. I decided that I would try and remove as much of the foam as possible, so using a strainer, I put it under the tap and began removing the foam. This of course took too long and I was concerned about wasting water, so instead I took to using a spray bottle, which turned out to do a much better job. 

This is what my soaked, tiny potpourri looked like:

After I had repeated this process, I ended up with a pile of soggy, unattractive potpourri pulp. From then on, I knew it would be easier to work with because I had removed most of the excess chemicals, so I didn't have to worry so much about the foaming.

I then added it to water and with assistance, tested if it would be good enough on it's own to form a pulp good enough to make paper from. The result wasn't very pleasing so I decided to cut up squares of a light paper to give a little strength to the mix. The fibers in the newly added paper seemed like they would bind well with my potpourri.

After this was all blended, it was time to start collecting sheets using the deckle. The following is an example of how the paper turned out once ready for drying on a j-cloth.

Apologies for the bad photos, my phone had just done a camera firmware update and reverted to default shutter speed!

Once this had dried, I was actually very pleased with the results and in today's class, I was able to produce a lino cut that I can use as a test to see if printing works on different types of handmade paper. It printed a LOT better than I had expected.

Gelatin Printing on Handmade Paper!

Today was pretty fun because I learned something new in Gelatin Printing. Siobhan showed us the basics and we were left to experiment. I decided to try something on my own and instead of applying paint directly to the Gelatin, I got a palette and rolled my paint in that instead. I then imprinted things like leaves into the paint which left various marks, this was then printed onto regular A4 paper, which was then taken and applied to the Gelatin. From there I then used my handmade paper to pickup any paint that was on the Gelatin. It sounds pretty complicated but it's really not. The overall effect worked really nicely and I'm glad I got to try this out. My only gripe is that some of my colour came out pretty muddy and I wished I had more paper at the time ready to print on.

These are some of my results.