soft ground experiments

With time to spare in the workshop today I decided to try some experiments in soft ground etching. Soft ground has always been my favourite way to create etched images but as we are a 'non toxic' workshop the traditional method of melting wax onto the plate is out. I read that Graphic Chemical relief ink can be used as a ground; soft when it's wet and then also as a hard ground when it's dry, and thought it might be worth a try...


I tried various thicknesses of ink, applied with a roller, and various different tools to draw both through paper (which lifts off ground) and directly (which displaces it). I tried drawing on the plate as soon as it was coated, then at 10 minute intervals as the ink dried. Unlike my previous attempts with a different acrylic soft ground, this ink seems to dry quite slowly giving a large window of opportunity for drawing... top image drawn through paper after 5 mins, bottom drawn after 35 mins...

I also tried painting with various consistencies of the ink directly on the un-coated plate, and used water to dissolve parts creating the opposite effect...

I didn't get chance to etch the plates as the ink takes up to 24 hours to dry depending on thickness, but I can't wait to see what they all turn out like as it feels quite promising. Now I've just got to work out the etching times...

P.S. I like the little mono prints made with the removed ink too :)

experiments

I've been doing some more etching experiments (continuing on from the vaseline ones a few months ago), this time with oil based printing ink...


The ink doeasn't hold up very well in the ferric (the chemical used to etch the plate) but because of this, and depending on the ink's thickness, it gives a lovely speckly etch, which you can see if you click on this picture to enlarge it...


It's hard to catch it at the right moment, too long and all you get is black... not a good look! I tried various ways of applying the ink; directly with a roller, transfered from another plate by passing through the press, smearing with a cloth, and inking up ferns and pressing these onto the pre aqautinted plate.

Here I applied ink with a roller, then ferns, then run it all through the press so the ferns picked up the ink and left the copper exposed. It wasn't as successful as I hoped!


And this is kind of the opposite process; ink from the ferns transferred to the aquatint plate (the scratches are becuase I was using the backs of old plates for my experiments, copper is expensive these days!) I think this has potential for use as a background, in a lighter colour (but don't get me started on colour, there's too much to think about already!)


This is the print that was left on the paper when I ran the first plate through the press...


And this one is a print of the ink left on the ferns...


I like these mono prints, you can really see the detail of the ferns if you click to make the image bigger :) And they're so quick and surprising to produce (remember the bird mono prints I did a while back? I've been wanting to have a go at that with plants (as opposed to paper cut outs) for a while now, hopefully I'll get chance to try it out next week!)

I feel like I'm getting somewhere with these etchings though, it's difficult as there are so many variables, but I also kind of like that, it's partly out of my control and I feel like that gives me the freedom to mess it up. I'm not trying to make anything 'finnished' with these, just to see what's possible. The hard bit comes when I try to take a bit more control and it becomes my fault when it looks rubbish; insted of being able to put it down to chance, fate or accident the outcome relies more on skill. Scary prospect!

book for beth

Rounded spine book with tracing paper dust cover and paper tree cut out...

It's the book from yesterday, with a little tree cut out to be used as a card and then stored away in the cover for safe keeping... and here are some gratuitous paper shots of the inside...

Tissue paper, tracing paper, watercolour paper, cartridge, newsprint, kraft paper, graph paper... (actually, I want to keep it)

I also tried a bit of an experiment with the covering of the book; I wanted a particular red colour and a softer texture which the buckram couldn't provide, so I used quilting cotton and ironed on some fusable interfacing to create a kind of book cloth... I've tried this before with bondaweb but it was a bit floppy so this time I bought the firmest interfacing I could find and it seems to have worked ok (apart from a few glue splodges, but we won't mention them). Its definitely something I think is worth having another go at :)

practice

Paper, thread, glue. Board, buckram, glue. Ink. 

Practice.

expanded spine

Still working my way through Keth Smith's Non Adhesive Bindings Vol 1'... and its a long job! Today I had a go at an expanded spine concertina, and although the only thread I could find thick enough was some kind of scratchy gardening twine it seems to have worked ok...

I haven't put a cover on it yet, I think it will need to be hinged front and back to allow for the swell, or perhaps just shorter than the accordion so the spine extends past the covers... I particularly like the beading along the edges of the tapes (and it also just happens to cover the sewing holes which I accidently spaced a little too wide :) )

The spine is supposed to curve around like this...

I tried a few of my own variations of this binding idea... most of them I pulled back so I could reuse the book block, the last one I did is definitely not the most sucessful! Hmmm...

Looks pretty, until...

But it's an interesting structure, and although the expanded spine is wider than the covers at first, it leaves room for all sorts of things to be stuck between the pages...

experiments

In the print room where I work we try to keep toxic chemicals to a minimum. For etching we use copper etched by ferric chloride (much safer than traditional nitric acid which does all sorts of dodgy things to a person!) and follow the method explained by Keith Howard in his book 'Non Toxic Intaglio Printmaking'.

 

This method is fairly new to me, and so I've been messing about with some scraps of copper and different resists; varnish, acrylic paint, marker pen and vaseline...

I've found the vaseline particularly interesting, spreading it in a thin layer and using a pencil/needle/finger to draw through it and move it about on the plate... lots of potential there I think...

And what I'm really looking for is a kind of soft ground etching technique (as I sometimes find hard ground etched lines too fine; soft ground lines have a softer, blunt pencil like line which I like), vaseline seems to have potential for this too... any ideas?? 

Sorry if this is all a bit garbled, it's been a busy day... But there's nothing like a good old experiment is there :)

monday

Lovely relaxing weekend away. A chance to catch up, a walk on the beach...

And a few examples of single sheet bindings. All the ways I could think of today (and not including Keith Smith's single sheet coptics, too complicated for the first lesson tomorrow, a bit too complicated for me!)

Various Japanese style bindings, with a few cover variations...

A stiff leaf binding (or, to put it more simply: using a hinge to stick the pages together, in various ways)

A kind of concertina pamphlet stitch combination, with pages sandwiched between the concertina folds (I like this one!)

And my favorite, an origami fold into which pages can slot...

Tomorrow I'm going to try a stab binding onto a stick, a perfect binding and a box/portfolio type thing. 

Have I missed any? 

experiment

Single sheet coptic binding across the spine, from Keith Smith's book 'Volume IV Non-Adhesive Binding: Sewing Single Sheets.' I bought this book a few years ago, and all the bindings seemed way too complicated then. In fact I never completed one...

A few days ago I picked up the book again, dusted it off (literally!) and decided to have another go...

This is my first attempt at the first structure in the book, and it's definitely much more complicated that anything I've sewn before. When I look at the diagrams of the sewing path I think I will never be able to follow them, but taking each a step at a time I have at least come up with something. Practice is in order I think...

I like this structure. It allows single sheets to be bound together and yet still open flat. Lots of potential...

Yes. Practice.

envelope problem

I've spent today trying to make some kind of envelope for some tree cards I've been making. I thought it might be nice if there was some kind of surprise opening method but the design kept getting more and more complicated, with more and more folds... I think perhaps now I'm just going to go for something plain and simple like I had in the first place, I don't want the envelope to be confusing, and really the card should be the surprise shouldn't it?


Oh I'm so bad at making decisions, so many possibilities... why can't I just decide on one thing!