College week 12/1 28th November, Pathway Project encore

Today we had a full day on our projects.  I was at college before 10 and keen to print my 'poor man's etching' and collagraph plates.  Since last week' enthusiastic session, I have failed to find time to make any more plates, but I had three, and in the end that was plenty in terms of the time available.  I was able to experiment a little to explore the different results from various variables such as the amount of ink, the different approaches to cleaning/preparing the plates (wiping the excess ink off with scrim), the type of paper and the length of time soaked, the pressure on the press roller, et, etc, etc.

The full-timers were having assessment eosins all day so we were not able to use all the rooms.  However, the small print room was free so Mary and I had the room to ourselves.

I did several prints from each of my three plates, and the results were fairly good.  I used cream cartridge paper, soaked for about 10 minutes.  Almost all of them came out well, with crisp outlines and confident colour.  

Here are some of today's better results.

I did one with two colours, rubbing them in separately with small pieces of scrim (a la poupette) and trying to avoid the two colours mixing.  I used a vivid green and sepia brown, which colours just happened to be to hand, but the colours do not do each other favours, and although I liked the two-colour effect, these particular colours didn't really work very well together.

Note to self: from time to time, in workshops or sessions like today, I sometimes think to myself "I'm only experimenting, this doesn't really matter" and I make some rather odd prints, using
random colours, whatever paper happens to be around, whatever.  But in fact I need to remember that every print is a potentially useful outcome, and it would be better if I made better use of every attempt...e.g. in this case, a more thoughtful choice of colours would have given me a two-colour print I might want to use, rather than one I'd happily consign to the bin.

I also did a couple of prints on cotton cloth, dug out from Teresa's store by Mary, and not even ironed before printing.  I had not realised you could print onto cloth this way through the etching press. They  worked surprisingly well, and this is something I'd like to try again in future project work.

I pegged the prints up to dry, but realised they were not quite dry by the timeI wanted to collect things up to go home.  So I took them down, and layered them up with tissue paper in between each one, and then I rolled the stack of prints through the press.  When I took them out, the ink had dried but had also transferred a 'shadow' print onto the tissue paper interleaves.  These look rather good and may be useful when I come to develop the prints at home. A nice surprise!

It was good to be working on my own today, feeling fairly confident that I was doing something focussed. and other people seemed to be similar enthusiastic and positive today.

Useful tutorial session with Mark, too, which made me find various new ideas for the project, and beginning to think about Project II, following our assessment day next week.