Printing 3

Final day of the printmaking module - and we printed in relief and intaglio, using the plates we'd made last week.

Inking up for relief printing involves thinly rolled-out ink, transferred to the roller and then to the plate, rolled in different directions to avoid roller marks -To work the press for relief printing, you push a lever to align the platten and then pull a big handle to apply pressure - after layering up tissue, plate, paper, tissue, blankets, of course -

Inking up for intaglio involves "squeegees" to apply the ink (into the cracks and crevices), scrim to remove the surface ink -And the press rolls over the plates, again between tissue paper, under the blankets (that big wheel takes a lot of turning) -

Despite handcleaner and scrubbing, the ink tends to linger -

Worth it for the thrill of seeing how the print has come out -

Three of these are intaglio - the one with black faces is printed in relief. Top left, care taken with the inking (click on image if you want to see it a bit larger); bottom left, over-inked (deliberately!) but ink removed from faces; bottom right, the ghost print - a second print without re-inking - which also shows the importance to taking the time to place your paper carefully -

Playing with textures, to see what happens - this little plate has all sorts: dots and scratches into the cardboard, net pressed into modelling paste and net glued on, pva glue showing the brushmarks, shapes gouged out and then glued back on, crumpled tinfoil... I like the white lines around the relief areas. But don't bits of fabric always look like ... bits of fabric ...

With 14 people all excited about "seeing what would happen", it was a buzzy class. In the afternoon the excitement continued as we did photoetching, using monochrome photographs we had photocopied or printed onto acetate.

I learned quite a bit from this - first, know the size of the plate - my pix were too small, really. And though the crispness of the image on the bottom came through, the texture above didn't - they needed different exposure times and different times in the acid. The one on the left, after the plate went back into the acid, got a bit more texture into the top, but the bottom was overexposed -Here are the images, showing the subtleties of texture that might appear with skilled printing (or it might be better to use photos as photos?) They're better in colour! - blue and yellow on top, reds on the bottom.

So that's yet another skill to develop - looking at things tonally, rather than chromatically.