Eithin

Knotwork dragon - plate & proof

2010-02-04T00:09:00.002Z

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

2010-02-03T01:21:00.002Z

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

2010-01-25T18:09:00.006Z

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

Photo by Nick Metcalfe.

Reeds

2009-12-29T17:14:00.003Z

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

2009-12-21T18:14:00.003Z

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

2009-12-16T19:06:00.005Z

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

2009-12-16T17:13:00.003Z

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.

V&A - Mediaeval and Renaissance Galleries

2009-12-02T23:33:00.003Z

The V&A opened ten new galleries today, and I went along to see them. Even by V&A standards, they're completely full of Shiny Things. I don't think I can do descriptive justice to them, so I'll leave you with some of the pictures I twittered from there. (On Twitter as @Eithin, please do follow!)

A Byzantine dish with an image of a hawk, quite common-grade.

The Symmachi panel, showing a Roman priestess making an offering at an altar.

Richard the Lionheart, from Matthew Paris's History of England.

Skull and crossbones detail from a funerary carpet (I'd never even heard of funerary carpets before).

A printed playing card showing the Nine of Hares.

Monotyping

2009-11-18T16:39:00.001Z

As I posted here, I experimented a bit with monotyping. Since I've finally managed to get a decent picture of it, here you are!

Night cloud pendants

2009-10-30T14:46:00.002Z

This is a new technique for me, but I think it's worked out. The pendant is a 35mm square of artist's mountboard, covered in something like six layers of acrylic paint and varnish (well, gloss gel glaze - it functions perfectly as a varnish, with the added advantages of being more durable and less sticky on skin than picture varnish) with a ribbon loop glued on the back.

Telling Tales at the V&A

2009-09-07T09:12:00.003Z

I and the Mediaevalist spent Saturday afternoon wandering around the V&A, starting with their delightful Telling Tales exhibition (warning: plays sound effects at you). It's concerned with design "in the spirit of storytelling", and does it rather well. The first area of three is an enchanted glade, subdivided with forest-patterned drapes and filled with interesting, whimsical, somewhat threatening furniture; the second, the castle, is divided in two. To the left we have neo-Regency, more or less in the style of Perrault on postmodernism, and to the right we have gleaming mirrored walls and floor (which reflected the gallery lighting, sadly, but it could have been a lot worse) with a selection of "Robber Baron" furniture and some rather strange and whimsical tulip vases.

The last section of the three is entitled "Heaven and Hell", which is normally a bad sign, but the conceit behind this - works exploring psychoanalysis, the idea of the memento mori, and the tension between life & death - worked out. So we have cute huggable mushroom clouds, a sensory isolation chamber modelled on a skull, and a "Lovers' Rug" representing the quantity of blood in two peoples' bodies. This section interested and enthused me less than the other two, but I suspect that that's as much down to the curatorial design - a rather dim, cramped uterus-shaped black corridor, with oddly positioned windows into well-lit rooms with the exhibits - as the art.

Brown & gold collar

2009-08-30T15:42:00.003Z

Photo by Nick Metcalfe.

Brown leather with gold acrylic ink, modelled by my Elly.

Monotyping

2009-08-28T14:07:00.002Z

I'd been vaguely aware of the existence of monotyping before, but until I found an old copy of The Painterly Print in a Notting Hill second-hand bookshop I hadn't really considered trying it out. It's a good way to use up the leftover ink I dollop out onto my glass plate after doing a batch of prints from something else (in this case, a set of 20 woodblock printed cards - they'll be up online when they're dry enough to scan) and it's great fun.

The printmaking process I've been using so far doesn't give much latitude for Messing Around with the ink - roll it on thinly and evenly and start smoothing away with the baren, and that's it. What I did with the leftover ink, after doing 20 A6 cards, was to roll it out evenly across the glass plate, smear it around in wide curves with a piece of kitchen roll, mess it around a lot with a brush (artificial bristle, no. 8 or so) and then scrape a lot of loops and whorls with the stump end of the same brush.

Because there was just so much ink left over, I could press really lightly with the baren, and get a vivid black/white contrast I hadn't expected. Black ink on glass over even a quite light surface (one of the inner pages of the Waltham Forest News) doesn't show up much of a contrast between thick and nearly-cleared layers, so the looping white and pale grey lines I got were a pleasant surprise.

I managed to take three cognates from the plate as well as the print itself, though the fourth is mostly cloudy tones rather than noticeable lines.

Note to self:

2009-08-09T14:16:00.002Z

Do not attempt to print anything out from Gimp. It Does Not Work very well. Render it to PDF first.

One White Tree

2009-08-04T23:24:00.002Z

I'm quite pleased with this one. The image of a white tree on a black ground is something I've been trying to do for a while now, and not managed to my satisfaction. I did this partly as an excuse to use the new white ink (Graphic Chemical printer's ink - though having switched to a tin and spatula with the black, going back to the stiff metal tube for the white is painful) - or to put it another way, I got the white ink so I'd feel impelled to use it! The paper is Fabriano Tiziano, which is technically a pastel paper, but is also the best coloured paper I've found. The black handmade paper I posted about a while back is very nice, but it's about as lightfast as your average Ringwraith, so no good there. I'm not sure about the rating of this stuff, but it's got to be a great deal better.

I'm not so good at the symmetry thing, being thoroughly right-handed - it's much, much easier for me to draw the network lines going up and to the left than it is to draw them up and to the right. The right hand side of the tree is much more fluid and less cluttered as a result.

Smearing varnish

2009-07-22T14:55:00.003Z

It turns out that Rheotech gloss gel medium - which I actually use much more often as a clear or tinted glaze, since it's better at covering odd surfaces than picture varnish is, and it's more permanent - interacts really badly with printer's ink. It picks it up and smears it around, making a peculiar hazy grey smudge everywhere.

Whilst it's an interesting effect, and one I'll almost certainly want to use some other time, it's just ruined a collage I was making, so I'm quite annoyed.

T-shirt printing

2009-07-14T21:26:00.002Z

I've been experimenting today with block printing directly onto fabric, and it's come out pretty well. I used my cartouche block, with the same printer's ink (incidentally, using a 1lb tin and a spatula instead of a squeezy metal tube makes things quite a lot easier) and a metal spoon to make sure the ink penetrated right the way through the fabric.

This stuff has proved far too tenacious to wash out of paper once it's dried in, so I'm hoping it'll be the same in a normal wash - obviously, I'll do a test wash first rather than putting it in with my good shirts!

The only problem with the setup I was using is the difficulty of keeping the fabric away from the block once I've done the transfer and started to peel it off. The way I set it up was to turn the T-shirt inside out, lay it on my worktable with the label facing down, lift up the top (front) side, and slip the pre-inked block in before letting the fabric down slowly and smoothing it out as I went. That part worked out pretty well, though next time I'll probably use some artist's tape to stiffen the fabric around the printing area first.

Another way to do it would be to lay the block down first as normal, then lower the fabric onto it with something inside the garment to stiffen it up and stop the ink from transferring right through. Rubbing it through both layers probably wouldn't work well, but given that the ink glues the substrate down very effectively it would be extremely easy to turn the T-shirt inside out around the block.

A third way, of course, would be to lay the T-shirt down right-side-out and front-up, and then lower a vinyl block onto it. Whilst I haven't tried printing this way yet, the vinyl is flexible enough that it should be entirely possible to rub from the back of the plate rather than the back of the substrate.

It did turn out that I could have done with a couple of extra hands when peeling the fabric off the block, but stiffening it up (ideally I'd use a tapestry frame, but finding one large enough to give enough clear space inside but small enough to fit inside a T-shirt and get a decent grip all around might be problematic) should deal with that one too.

Other people printing

2009-07-03T22:30:00.003Z

Elly (my girlfriend) was watching me do some printing the other day, and asked if she could have a go just as I was thinking about suggesting it. (Especially since I'd just picked up some Ellie Poo paper...) Here's the results. It's turned out rather nicely.

Recycled art papers

2009-07-03T21:58:00.004Z

I haven't been posting for a while, because Various Circumstances pretty much entirely took away my creative impulse. It's getting better now, though, and I've been doing some more printmaking. Partly, the impetus for that came from a visit to Falkiner's, and the discovery of three really nice recycled art papers.

The one in the centre there is Fabriano Ecologica - it's bright white, with a good middling texture, comes in two grades (Sketching and Drawing - Schizzi, Sketching, is 120gsm, and Drawing is heavier so I left that), and comes in A4 pads of 80 sheets for £6.50, which is a really good bargain for acid free good quality art paper. It's made entirely of recycled post-consumer materials using renewable energy; the pack quotes "more than 50% of the energy used for producing this paper is hydroelectric". There's inevitably going to be some secondary bleaching of the pulp, but still.

The one on the right is Redeem 130, which is a good solid, hard-textured paper with a pleasant parchment-beige tint. It looks like it will be extremely good for computer printing. Pleasantly, it's also extremely cheap!

The third, which I've been wanting to try out for some time, is Ellie Poo paper, which is as the name suggests made from elephant dung. It's lovely tactile stuff, with small vegetable inclusions and a warm pale beige colour.

Criticism

2009-04-21T11:00:00.003Z

This is a collage piece I made for the Eastercon art show, pretty much entirely as an experiment. It's one of my favourite SF short stories, Omnilingual by H Beam Piper (Project Gutenberg link) done using your basic papier-mache technique on a Daler board base. The discolouration is done with two layers of tinted glaze (gold, then brown) and edged with black acrylic. I'm quite pleased with the result, and I think I'll have to do some more of these in the future.

Barens and spoons II

2009-04-03T16:02:00.002Z

This is the print done with a spoon, as promised. It's slightly different paper (from my stock - I've not been keeping as good track of it as I'd like to, so I'm not completely sure whether this is Fabriano Accademia or Atlantis Heritage Woodfree).

Notice the sheer amount of ink on the flat areas, and the way all the internal cut ridges show up - they got just as much ink on them in the first one, but the baren didn't press the paper down into them in the same way that the hard, solid spoon does.

Unexpected bonus!

2009-04-02T19:49:00.001Z

Checking the cupboard, I've discovered I have a lot more Satirico mask blanks (the half-face masks with long hook-pointed noses) than I thought. I'd had the idea that I was down to one or two unused ones, but no, there are seven here, so I'm quite pleased.

And also about to do something creative to one or two of them.

Brigid's Cross print

2009-03-29T20:26:00.002Z

As promised!

This was the first one I pulled from the block, done on Daler-Rowney Canford paper with a (cheap) baren. The ones I did with a spoon are still drying, since there's so much more ink on them (in them, in fact) so I can't post a comparison picture yet.

Rather good fanart

2009-03-29T19:28:00.002Z

Found while wandering the internet in search of SFnal livejournal icons - Minerva McGonagall, in the style of Aubrey Beardsley.

Barens and spoons

2009-03-29T01:49:00.003Z

I've just taken half a dozen prints from the Brigid's Cross block I posted about before, since I finally finished carving it tonight.

It's always an amazing feeling to peel off the first print and see the results - once it translates itself from vinyl & wet ink to paper (and reverses itself in the process) it makes it really easy to look on my work with new eyes. It stops being the piece of vinyl I've had on my table for the last month, and I can finally see how all those awkward curves and chunky lines, the unexpected holes and the scars where the sankakuto slipped, transform themselves on paper.

I experimented for a couple of them, going back to the serving spoon (solid, sturdy 1950s EPNS) I used when I first started doing this. It's much harder and gives a very solid line, and unlike the baren it doesn't have a grain, so that changes how you use it. Also unlike the baren, it wasn't designed to be used in that position, so it leaves my right hand and wrist aching. And rather warm, because the friction of the plated steel across the back of the paper gets it hot enough to be uncomfortable.

Tomorrow, when they're dry, I'll post pictures for comparison.i