Maps Project, More kinds of printing, 1st December

After my day in college doing 'poor man's etching' and collagraph prints, I wanted to explore printingg a bit more - but what with the lack of time in college, and the chaos at home because of the building work in the kitchen, i have been reed to doing things in a very basic way.  So I have only been able to make a very small attempt at relief printing, using what was available at home.

The biggest problem was that I only hd acrylic paint, and not printing ink (I have some relief printing ink, but it has been pack away and is totally impossible to relocate at present).  I discovered very quickly that you need th right kind of ink!

However, I had a go first at doing a mono print, rolling ink onto an acetate sheet, dropping paper onto that, and then tracing the lines of my walking routes round Bristol through all the layers, using a sharp pencil and working as fast as I could.

The first print was very dark - there was too much paint, and it was paint! And it wasn't printing ink!.

This was what the acetate ink plate looked like after the print was pulled.  Still rather a lot of ink!

So I managed to pull a second print from the inked acetate, which was actually a lot better.

 A second inking failed for a different reason - I drew into the print rather too heavily, and the paper (torn form a spare sketch book) stuck to the printing planet and tore a little.  Effects of the wrong kind of ink and the wrong kind of paper.

This was the acetate inked plate, with traces of torn paper stuck to the paint.

Next up, I decided to try something much simpler, a potato cut relief print.  I cut a motif derived from my 'walking routes' print design, and inked the potato using a sponge brush. The results were far from brilliant (I think I would have done better with proper printing ink) but I quite liked the design itself.

This is where I was working, on the kitchen table in the cramped chaos of the sitting room.

Inspired by this design, I cut a simple lino block, and tried printing from that.  The results were seriously marred by the lack of proper printing ink....

 I might have another go at this later with the right materials, as I quite liked the effect, and I would like to see why it looked like as a repeat pattern over a larger area.