Six by Six by Eleven: the prints, part 1
In my last post, I showed the eleven plates I had made, to be printed the Print Room at the University of Lincoln. Last week, I was able to devote a whole day to the task.
I chose to begin with what I thought would be a couple of very interesting plates, made using glasspaper. The plates looked great, with accurately cut shapes and punched holes.
Unfortunately, on the printing side it wasn’t a great start. Although well sealed with many layers of varnish, ink still managed to bleed around and under the cut edges. Ordinarily, I would show them here, but they were just too embarrassing! Perhaps I should have known that this might happen – lesson learned.
So, after about an hour of inking and attempting to print these troublesome plates, I turned to the other eight. Here, I had much more fun, and managed to make some very interesting prints…
‘Hessian’ plate and print. brown-black and gold inks
‘Hessian’ print detail
Overlapping lines in carborundum on the plate produced this print effect. I was particularly pleased with the way that the grain from the birch plywood plate was reproduced.
Print detail
It wasn’t all plain sailing though. A couple of the plates, made using a plasticised edging material, were initially over-inked, resulting in this…
However, I could see the potential in the vein-like tracery details of the fabric, so I re-inked. I really love the results…
This edging material makes really interesting marks on paper. I’ll be working with it much more in the future
Multicoloured print from a plate featuring various kinds of edging materials. The embossing on the paper was gorgeous!
I have to say that I’m loving the square print format and I’m planning to feature an entire wall of them in my exhibition in September. Next time, I’ll show prints and details from the remaining four plates.
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