Knotwork dragon - plate & proof

That's the first proof from a block I've had waiting on my workbench for ages, waiting for me to work out how the top of the dragon's head should go. Since I took some WIP pictures of the block, here they are - first, while it was waiting, then all finished and ready to ink.





And this one's all inked up and ready to print. The masking tape is there to stop as many as possible of the traces of ink on the open areas getting transferred - as you see from the proof, it's only partially successful.



As for where next - I'm happy with the image itself, but I need to do more work on the open areas, and get a more consistent transfer of ink from the right-hand edge. The effect there is partly down to the surface of the block - it's standard with water-based ink on a new vinyl block, and tends to tone down when the block's built up a suitable layer of ink over time - but I'm fairly sure it's also in my brayer technique. One of these days I really must find some others in different sizes.

High Days - Imbolc

Whilst I'm only about 20% pagan at the best of times (most of the rest is Quaker) I still like to keep the High Days, and today was Imbolc. Or, for the Christian side of me, St Brigid's Day - patron of poets, blacksmiths, and healers, and always one of my favourites.

My normal artistic practice on High Days is to try and make something new - the rule is that anything I make has to be kept or given away, rather than sold. That's partly just to make sure that I remember why I'm doing this, and as a reminder to try new things or go back to techniques I haven't used in ages.

Today, I started out by playing around with some two-part epoxy putty, and there's some jewellery hardening across the room - a stick pin, three brooches, and two choker slides. The brooches I've done before, but that was years ago, before I acquired a Proxxon drill for sanding and buffing. (Vorsprung-grade German engineering, slightly better than Dremel in its class.) There is almost no craftsman's task I hate more than sanding things by hand, and consequently I'm not very good at it. Late tomorrow, or in a few days, they'll be ready to paint & varnish, and we'll see how they turn out.

After that, I started playing around with some colour/paper/glaze combinations I hadn't tried before, and this was the result. It's Ara dark bronze acrylic on Gmund bierpapier (Boc), with three coats of lightly gold-tinted Rheotech gloss gel glaze. I was rather impatient, and put the second & third glaze coats on when the first was touch-dry instead of properly clarified, but I rather like the clouded effect in this case - it looks like a faux-nori finish, which entertains me.

Lucifer mask

I made this one for a reading of Marlowe's Dr Faustus.



Photo by Nick Metcalfe.

Reeds

Linocut, done directly with the sankakuto without any preliminary drawing. The brown one is Gmund Bierpapier (Boc) - recycled art paper made from beer. How awesome is that? I'll tell you how awesome it is. It is AWESOME. The white one is, I'm fairly sure, Fabriano Academica.

This piece was inspired by one of my favourite things in the V&A - a ceramic plate made around 1955 by a Japanese artist, Kitaoji Rosanjin (1883-1959). Their official record has no image, so have this less-than-optimal one I took there yesterday.

Golden gridwork

I carved this block quite a while ago, but was disappointed with the effect just using printer's ink. When I decided to try the gold I'd mixed up, though, it looked much better - the texture and gleam give the design much more depth. Of course, I'm also using heavily textured handmade paper here, so that makes a difference too. This is some rather nice khadi paper - it's not even slightly lightfast, sadly, but I don't think that makes a difference here.

Relief printing with acrylic paint

I took an old printing block - my Celtic Cross block - and made up a large glob of gold acrylic, mixed with fabric medium, to use with it. The consistency is a lot thinner and sloppier than printer's ink, so it's harder to control, but that's part of the fun of it. Apologies for phonecamera pics rather than scanning them - these will dry quicker than normal printed ones, but not this quickly! These are both on Fabriano papers - first Ecologica (Schizzi grade) and then Tiziano black. I also did two onto Gmund bierpapier, which came out wonderfully, but since they're reflective gold/black on dark brown they're impossible to photograph till I have proper daylight.





I don't generally bother cleaning my blocks after use, and just leave the (water-based) ink to dry and form a surface layer for next time. The acrylic paint was actually softening and re-awakening that, and it all prints together, giving a really interesting textural effect. Obviously, it's not actually printing a layer of black underneath a gold wash (the other way around, if anything), but that's what it looks like. It'll be interesting to see how the technique works out on a clean block that's never been used with ink.

The acrylic stays wet and usable on the block much longer than I'd worried it would - that might partly be down to the fabric medium, which I added because this was mostly a test for printing directly onto T-shirts and so on. On the other hand, it might also just be because acrylic is still completely capable of colour transfer when almost dry.

Drypoint experiment 1

My first try at drypoint with watercolour pencils has given fairly encouraging results. Not very attractive, but then the idea was to answer the question, Can I print in watercolour without a press?, and it's definitely that.


This is my first time working with a drypoint needle, so one of the things I learn from this is that I have to use it much more authoritatively. It's a great deal like using a pencil, and lack of pressure is one of my besetting sins when doing that, too. On the other hand, these transparent plastic plates are wonderful, and I'm already planning several things involving tracing images through them. Well, mostly wonderful - it's difficult to see where your lines are going without strong direct, and preferably low-angle, light on your workpiece, so that's going to take some getting used to.

I only have a set of very low-end watercolour pencils, so that's not going to give ideal results, but they're still giving quite good transfer to the plate. The scratched portions have about as much tooth as rough paper, but the unscratched portions have none at all, so it's really easy to confine the colour to the correct areas.

When printing, I used Ellie Poo paper, since I had some A4 sheets of that lying around ready to hand; I sprayed it thoroughly with water, and wiped off the surface excess before laying it on the plate. As you can see from the smear in the corner, the water doesn't glue it down in the same way that printer's ink does, so that's going to take some getting used to. More relevant, though, is that wet 90 gsm paper is very prone to wrinkles and distortion when rubbing (I was printing with a spoon - really ought to use a press, but I don't have access to one) so it's important to rub only from the centre outwards, rather than back and forth across the paper as I normally do.

Next time I try this, I'll do a test with some Ingres paper and with some actual watercolour paper - that's designed for precisely the same distortion problem, after all.