Still no printmaking...

BUT i have been doodling along happily with the pens i got for Christmas!

If i start drawing without thinking, from the bottom of my über-ich so to say,
I get surprised by how disturbed my Inner Self obviously is.

And fond of weird people.

In funny positions.

And stray cats with superpowers.

And middle-aged women with cross-species doubts.


No wonder that i have a hard time figuring out some sort of line in my work...
Happy new year!

Not really printmaking

Hi there!

Here are some illustrations i have been working on for a (still very much theoretical) children's book which i've been asked to illustrate. It really was a challenge to design from a story instead of making up the story as you design. I had a lot of struggle deciding on a form, a way of working. I tried linocut, i tried cutting stamps out of erasers, i tried drawing and aquarel-paint, but in the end it was drawing that won. I drew all the lines and then, quite like screenprinting, filled all shapes with textures. I'm not equally happy about all of them, i like the one with the red barn the most i think. The one with the fallen tree misses a bit of red but i can't think of anything red to fit in... Ideas?

 



















Have a very merry christmas!

X Ea

Saint Augu(s)tinus of Hippo, patron saint of printers

In the printmaking department we have a little niche where, I assume, once a statue of some sort stood. The first time I saw it it made me think of patron saints and how we should have one. After some research I found that there actually IS a patron saint dedicated to printers and printmakers (and also stumbled upon a discussion about the need for a patron saint dedicated to the printer as an appliance). His name is Augustine of Hippo, Augustinus de Hippo in Latin.

So after a month of vigorous carving in a sheet of MDF I had my cliché complete with faulty spelling of his name which i hope won't keep him from doing his job.

Problem was (of course, there always are problems), it was to big to put through our press... So I ended up printing it by hand with the back of a teaspoon, meticulously rubbing all 7500 square centimetres of it. Twice. 

These prints were just proofs, eventually it will be printed in gold but i have to give my back a bit of a rest before i take on that challenge.

There he is in all of his glory, all 120 centimetres of
it!

Detail of his cloak, representing the four different ways of printing: An etching
pen for intaglio, a block print roller, a lithographic roller and a squeegee for
screen-printing.

Detail of his head and wrongly spelled name.
Since Augutinus lived quite some time ago there
were no accurate descriptions of his appearance
so I borrowed a rendition of Jesus's face, and
since he is one of the good guys I figured he
wouldn't mind. Plus it sort of gives even more
protection. Nice!


That's all for today, tomorrow we have our last
schoolday for the year, i will be busy making
sketches of the chainsaw-man next week but
maybe something printed will come out as well.

Have a nice one!
Ea

 

 

 

Wish i was there!

While i was in Holland to give non-printmaking-related workshops i went to visit my friend Jiri who got a job as graphical workshop manager on my old art academy, AKV st. Joost in den Bosch. I hadn't been there for quite some time and sort of forgot how big and well-equiped our workshop was!
So here are some pictures to make you drool...

Etching / blockprint / lithography

Jiri

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a LOT of fonts!

Heaven = a closet filled with Unico inks.

Screenprinting workshop

Jiri showed me this effect, made by dissolving tuche in
distilled water applied to a lithographic stone. Pretty!

That's all, folks!

You can't start early enough...

Wednesday i was babysitting little S.

I am generally speaking not a children-person, i don't like discussing life with people with no feeling for rhetorics or logical argumentation.

But when S. asked what i did in school and i said 'making stamps' she inquired how exactly one goes about making stamps. I'm not one to miss a good opportunity to spread the joys of printmaking, and after a theoretical lecture on intaglio, block print and screen print adjusted to the level of a 5 year old we made potato stamps. It was fun!

Totally bitten by the printmaking bug i tell you!


In other news:

Tuesday i will be on my way to the Netherlands. The reason i'm going now is that i will be giving a workshop in crocheting and knitting with video- and cassette tape at the Strp festival in Eindhoven. For all of you in the neighbourhood: Come join me friday november 26th between 20.00 - 23.00 in the Lichtcafé!

May saint Augstine of Hippo have mercy on your printing press!

The Amsterdam Project

[excusez-moi for the crappy layout, i seem to be in an ongoing battle with regards to picture-placement in blogger. I had this post ready last Saturday and decided to post it now anyway. Things will get better, i promise!]


Booyah! I'm finished!
It took me nearly three weeks and seven different techniques but now everything is printed and ready to be made into a book of some form. The images are presented in no particular order except the first and last since i'm still deciding what the order should be.

 

 The text reads: 'I looked and looked but found nothing'. It is printed with ImageOn film on plastic. In the process i found out that it is doable to correct the image using dry point and really small strokes. The red figure is cut out plastic blockprint.

Offset plate. Me and offset/lithography are still not madly in love although we are getting sort of interested in each other. We send each other late-night text messages but are not (yet) yearning for each others babies.

 

I already talked about this one in an earlier post but for the sake of consistency: Here it is again.

Same here.

 

Another ImageOn on plastic. I like how you can cut out shapes, and the way the ImageOn flakes off at the edges creating a rough and uneven look.

Yes, it's a fork. Offset-printed in silver. What more can i say....

Aquatint owl, in purple this time, see previous post for more specifics.

An aquatint which i inked with 3 colors at the same time, with a second layer in dry point (the red one). This scan doesn't do the colors much justice, it's way warmer in real life.

The text says: 'Everything was green and blue and grey and green again, but smaller'. For me it pretty much sums up the way the Netherlands look from my newfound Swedish perspective.

In other news:

I found out that burin engraving works pretty well on dry point plastic, much easier than copper or zinc and it produces a lot less knife-sharp burrs to make you bleed and cry. Nice!

Live long and prosper, i'm off to watch Greys Anatomy!

ImageOn

My first steps in the wonderful world of ImageOn did - of course - start with doing stuff wrong. But as so often the beauty is in the mistakes, and i am thoroughly pleased with the result. 

ImageOn is a technique where you lay a photosensitive layer on a copper plate (or dry-point plastic as shown in the next image) and use a mask, like a photograph or drawing on a see-through material, to expose. The photosensitive layer stays soft where uv-light is blocked, and you wash out the exposed image with an intaglio plate as result which is printed in the same way as an ordinary etching.

The doing-stuff-wrong part happened when i laid my exposed plate in the wrong developer bath, which was meant for offset plates and much more aggressive than the one i should have been using. This resulted in blistering on the image and some offensive language on my part. 

I decided to print it anyway and i am happy i did so because i really like the grittiness of the image. 

This is another way of using ImageOn, with a photograph printed on see-through paper as mask and dry-needle plastic as a base. The words on top of the building were added by hand. 

The cool thing with ImageOn on plastic is that you can cut out shapes with relative ease, even though the photosensitive film doesn't adhere quite as well on plastic because plastic clearly contains a minute amount of fat. I used sandpaper to roughen the surface which helped, but when cutting into the plastic + film small bits of film chipped off. I don't really mind and think it adds character to the whole image but it's good to know. 

Speaking of knowledge:  I ordered The Thames and Hudson Manual of Etching and Engraving, which is absolutely packed with everything you'd ever want to know about said techniques, for a whopping total of 70 Swedish crones (roughly 7 euros) including shipping from the UK, after borrowing it from the library and falling in all kinds of love. My library of printmaking bibles is growing slowly but steadily! 

This weekend I'll be in school for most of the time, trying to finish my to-do list for the Amsterdam project which now has 13 to-dos staring me in the face and a deadline for next Thursday. Brr.

Have a happy weekend!

Aquatint, collography, dry needle and an exhibition at the Göteborg City Library

Well. Right now I am having some sort of cold so i am lucky to have a blog about printmaking, not language since my creative writing abilities are momentarily forever approaching zero. 

I had a group exhibition with the graphics department of KKV göteborg at the City Library of Göteborg. The exhibition space was marvelous, with excellent lighting and huge windows. I think we had about 1500 visitors in 6 days and really showed the world (or at least gothenburg) that printmaking is far from dead! 

One more dry point... 

This one is called 'Nina Bondesson förklarar konst och jag blir lycklig'  -> Nina Bondesson explains art and i am happy. She is verily the Shiznit! She gave us a lecture on art and how it comes into being, and sort of reconfirmed my idea that an artists focus should be on production and introspection rather than The Art World & brown-nosing. In the end we both might be totally wrong but to me 99% of the time printmaking feels  more alluring than actively profiling my own trademark.

Collography in cardboard - TDK Soundsystem

Originally thought to have 4 colors, it ended up being black & white because it looked sooo much better that way. I had never worked with cardboard as a printing material before and was quite surprised by the level of detail one can achieve. The second image is the cliché, looking really pretty and grungy with the orange-brown color of the shellac layer.

Aquatint!!! 

After our school trip to Amsterdam (it was amazing. i got to see rembrandts original copperplates which actually gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. I even arranged for the graphics department to pay a visit to Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier  where our lovely guide Christina Hallström turned out to be swedish which meant we got a whole tour in our (mostly) native language! Pictures of this trip will follow in a separate post. Some day. ) we were acquainted with yet another technique: Aqua-tint. 

I had been looking forward to this, i love me some grainy textures.  The little church is not at its final stage.  it's going to get an extra layer printed with plastic dry needle and the base layer is going to be inked with 3 different colors. It's part of a collage i am making based on Amsterdam. 

Me and some others went to see Legend of the Guardians in 3D which basically is 1,5 hours of epic owls. It was epic. Here is my take on the main character, Soren. 

We've also learned about image-on and lithographic plate but so far i have only managed to put my image-on plate in the lithographic-plate-developer with bubbly and ugly results so no supporting imagery there yet i'm afraid. Will do better next time, i promise! 

First Month

In september i started at Göteborg Konstskola and it is truly like I've died and gone to heaven.

So much so that i have managed to not be late for class once which, for me, is quite the achievement. In the last 5 weeks i have learnt how to etch and dry point and i even had a try at lithography. Here are some of the experiments i did in various techniques:

1. Twohead - dry needle

I always had the idea that etching was something only grown-ups could do, people with patience and color-coordinated socks. I am happy to say that i was totally wrong.

I really like the resistance of copper, i don't always manage to make the exact line i had planned but this gives way for a kind of freedom. (Dude. Five sentences into this blog and i'm already starting to be all vague and artsy like. Where will this end?)

2. Inuk - hard ground copper etching

This is Inuk the disgruntled Inuit, on the brink of adulthood and trying to rebel against his overprotective mother by growing a mustache.

3. Inuks Mama - Lithography

She looks way nicer than she actually is.

I feel a kind of ambivalence towards lithography. The sound and feeling of grinding stones is absolutely hypnotic and meditative, i love how the whole process makes me feel like an alchemist and i really enjoy inking the stone. But on the other hand there's drawing on the stone which i find really hard, you have to be so careful not touch the stone while you're working, and i miss the carving and cutting used for linoleum or etching/dry needle. I really want to try it again though, i just have to find my way i guess.

4. He doesn't know either - soft ground

Soft ground is hard! It has the same fragility as lithography, one sudden move and you've made some unintended mark. I had to reapply the ground 5 times because of this. It got on my nerves. Maybe something to do on a totally nerve-free day with loads of patience and focus and other such unobtainable qualities.

In conclusion: Printmaking rocks! Really! I really look forward to learning to do offset plates which we'll be doing after our school trip to Amsterdam (kroketten here i come) the coming week, and i'll be back here with results.