21/2/2011 It All Began In A Print Studio

Right lets have a look back on today shall we. A long successful and experimentation day in the studio. Woke up pretty early, bread was moldy so that bacon sandwich i planned went out the window. Anyway turned up at the studio 5 minutes early and the keen printers were already there with their first class passes to screen printing, which is a little bit annoying as i wanted to try this technique as one of my ideas was based around clothing but to be fair it wasn't the strongest idea.


So after this set back it was plan B. Caroline told me that plate was available and that Graham would give me a few pointers and help me throughout the day. I popped over to the wood workshop to get some acrylic plastic to etch into as a practice, couldn't be dealing with that card from last time. No plastic so i managed to get some scrap pieces of metal from Graham and i etched away. Annoyingly i didn't really have an idea to start from. I have moved away from patterns and furniture as i feel its not original enough. But i may still play around with it in my development work. As i was working from my research i came up with the idea of Ancient, derelict, old, beautiful buildings from across the globe mainly in extreme locations like Japanese mountains, Africa or the Himalayas. This is something i can work for and research for next time i'm in the print studio. Enough bla bla bla, lets have a look at some prints i did today.....

Sadly the scanner hasn't done these prints any justice. I worked from a photo just getting used to working on plate again and using the tools. I was a bit rusty so a lot of my lines aren't very smooth. I didn't really know where i was going with the print so i made it very rough and simple. I tried using some tonal areas on the first one which worked okay but with practice can only get better. One of the main problems today was that i wasn't getting the ink into the lines enough and i was rubbing the ink away to much so the prints came out very faint. I need to spend more time inking up the plate and perfecting this skill.

I had a bit more time in the afternoon to try out a few more techniques and i was introduced to the Dremel!! This baby hasn't been used by any student in 3 years and its brand new, i don't know why not, it's so much fun. The little power tool comes with a verity of different heads which make some interesting marks onto plate. It was fun playing around with it and extremely hard to control at first. Plus the noise level was deafening, it sounded like a dentist drilling into someone's teeth constantly. I slowly got used to the tool and will definitely be using it again. Working with the Dremel and the etching tools were completely different. I can see myself mixing mediums to get different effects. 

Below is my experimentation print with the Dremel.

Final print of the day, it was getting late but i wanted to bust out a satisfactory, dremel print to make my day productive. The scan hasn't worked very well but the textures look amazing and the plate it's self looks and feels awesome. I'm so tempted to do something with the plates because i dont want to waste them as they can look better than the prints at times. Once i'm a bit more skilled with the ink my prints will look a lot better but i'm looking forward to my next plate sessions and my new idea.