Printing Day

Today is a national holiday in Germany, and hubby and I belong to the small group of people who not only work today, but fight over who is allowed working time. Turned out we shared the day, and I spent a happy morning printing in my studio.

I should be working on instructions at the moment. Making and photographing books for instructions, that is. However, at the moment I feel so much more drawn to printing – and to my bottles – that I find it hard to keep working on journals. I started out with that, but just couldn’t stick with it. The same happened on my last studio day so that I still had three plates / blocks to print from. And it is not by coincidence that the smaller prints fit right into a bottle.

In the photo above you see some lino prints drying. Some are white on black, others have a hint of pink (on black). Here is a scan of two:

My intention was to try some printing techniques with the same motif. Next I tried a dry point etching on a rhenalon plate. Here are some results:

While scratching the plate, I found it hard to find the right pressure to use. Apparently I should have scratched a little harder and deeper, some of the lines are very faint. But it so happens that I quite like the effect. I think it is fitting that a feather would leave a faint imprint. It is very faint, though, and I experimented a little with how I wipe the plate. While the above example was rather thoroughly wiped, this is only wiped as few as possible:

– I like the first one better.

And then I tried something which I honestly thought was a waste of time, but it turns out I like the outcome best of today’s print. I read on Amanda’s blog that she used cardboard for drypoint etching some while ago. I dug this out last weekend, find it here. There she indeed says that she used cardboard to “get a tonal effect”. I must admit that at the time I didn’t  get what she was doing and going to achieve, and I still don’t completely understand her process. (What is pumice?) Anyway, using cardboard seemed attractive, and I just did what felt right and ended up with these:

There are some which I wiped even more thoroughly, but I like this example here.

Well, now I have to grab something to bite, get some orders ready to ship tomorrow morning, and then, maybe, sort to the big pile of last week’s misprints and try to make a list of things I do not want to do again…