Print Stories: Printing in Lincoln – Sinclair Ashman, Printmaker

Last Wednesday, I spent a whole day (yes, a whole day!) printing in the brilliant Print Room at the University Lincoln.

The day started slowly, as I was having difficulty wiping the plates clean in the backgrounds, where I wanted no ink to appear. I was also experimenting with the inclusion of metallic inks. However, as with previous attempts, I couldn’t get anywhere near the opacity and depth of colour that I can achieve with deeper colours, such as blacks, deep blues and burnt umber. Eventually though, I managed to get some decent results by inking up the plate with the darkest colour first, and then using the metallic colour on top. This worked much better, as the dark colour underpinned the overprinted ink, giving it much greater depth.

This has inspired me to try develop the use of metallics further, by printing all the darker tones first, before perhaps adding metallic details after printing, by brushing fine details, stippling or smearing ink or gilding wax where appropriate. But that’s for another day…

Here are the prints…