Prints outside
Bad prints
Garden printing
City Lit closed it’s doors on 17th March 2020. So now I’m printing at home, in the garden and in our flat. The course has continued online, so pleased it kept going, thanks to all our wonderful tutors for being innovative.
I wanted to say thank you to all the front line staff who have kept the country going and risked their lives during lockdown. Thanks to all the doctors and nurses, everyone who works for the NHS, every bus driver, tube worker, supermarket staff, dustbin men, supermarket staff, teachers, delivery drivers and everyone else who has kept the country going during the pandemic, I salute you all.
I kept out of the way and made prints and artwork, it keeps me happy and busy.
We had been taught how to make flutter books in one of the last classes at City lit and were due to deliver three versions of an artist book for the end of term.
I did a layout for the book in Indesign and then printed out sheets of acetate to expose on photo sensitive paper in the garden.
Dada
Dada, nihilistic and anti aesthetic movement in the arts that flourished primarily in Zurich, Switzerland, New York City, Berlin, Hannover and Paris. Dada artists’ reliance on accident and chance were later employed by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists. Critics have cited Dadaist influences on the punk rock movement of the 1970’s. www.britannica.com/art/Dada
Van Doesberg and Kate Steinistz, Hanover 1925
on grey paper. Images and text from Pioneers of modern typography by Herbert Spencer.
Screen printing
We start on screen printing in February 2020, pre lockdown. Before printing you need to save an image in Photoshop to print out onto acetate.
To create a halftone, open up image in Photoshop, select Image>Mode>Bitmap and select Halftone screen. A window will appear offering choices of dot shape and lines per inch.
Match the resolution to whatever you set your file resolution to usually 300dpi.
For Frequency, opt for between 40 and 65 for a 90 mesh screen. The larger the dot the lower the frequency. The Angle is the angle at which the dots are positioned, 45 degrees is the default. Save as a Tiff file and print onto acetate.
Preparing a screen
1. Place the screen paper-side toward you. Pour the light sensitive emulsion into a coating trough. Tip the lip against the bottom and with a single stroke, pull it to the top of the screen.
2. The screen should now go into a drying cabinet away from the light. Leave to dry thoroughly.
3. Expose the image on the light unit, don’t put the image too close to the edge of the screen. String needs to be placed in the well of the screen to increase the vacuum. After exposure (5 units) wash the screen on front and back, put finger onto hose to direct the water onto the screen. This will expose the image. Put screen at the bottom of the drying cupboard to dry.
Cover the yellow edges with masking tape, tape into the corners. Build snaps out of thick cardboard and stick with some masking tape onto the edges of the wooden frame. These stop the ink from sticking to the paper.
4. Make a master copy to use as registration. Print this onto tracing paper. The printing ink should be the consistancy of single cream. The squeegee should be bigger than the image size. Flood the image with ink and then make contact with the table, the squeegee angled at 60 degrees. Make three registration marks, two at the bottom and one down the side.
Printing
Colours need to be printed from light to dark. So if printing a 4 colour print, yellow first, then magenta, next cyan and finally black.
Colour blend
Try a colour blend with two colours, mix the two colours at the bottom of the screen. The more the colours overlap, the more gradated they will appear. Flood the screen with the inks and then pull the squeegee
back following the flooding lines.
Monoprinting
Work directly onto the mesh with a brush and ink. Don’t put on too much ink. Acrylic medium can be used to create negative space in the ink.
Using Posca pens
Pin a sheet of acetate on top of the printed master copy. Centralise the image under the acetate. Draw onto the acetate with lithographic pencil, Posca pen, black oil pastel, or black acrylic paint, expose acetate onto screen.
Thanks to great teaching from Adam Hogarth at City Lit, I’m just starting to get the hang of screen printing.
Cyanotypes
The course starts and our first task is to work on cyanotypes. I know already I’m going to love this.
To create artwork for a cyanotype, open an image in Photoshop. Under image choose grayscale>bitmap>300dpi. Method diffusion dither. This breaks the image up into dots. Save the file as a tiff and then under adjustments choose negative. The image then needs to be flipped horizontally so that it will print the right way round.
The chemicals needed to coat the paper are, 25grams of Ferric Ammonium Citrate, this is mixed with 100ml of water in a plastic measuring cylinder. Then mix 10 grams of Potassium Ferricyanide with 100ml of water in a separate measuring cylinder. The chemicals are then mixed together and the paper is coated, it will look yellow in colour. It is best to do this in low light conditions so that the chemicals down’t start to expose. The amount mixed will be enough to coat approximately 50 A4 sheets of paper.
The paper needs to dry in a dark place, or use a hair dryer. After the sheets are dry they can then be exposed with the acetate face down on the paper in the exposure unit for approximately 10 minutes at 75 units. I was to experiment with exposure times at home in sunlight during lockdown but that comes later.
An early cyanotype of my mum.
Abstract images can be made from coating an acetate with printing ink, then rubbing some off with a rag and adding drops of oil and paraffin. Thanks to Gareth Berwyn in the City Lit print room for those ideas.
There are a multitude of ideas to be explored with cyanotypes. I begin to create images in Photoshop using layers and my found images.
Overlaying acetates on each other, the images started to become surreal.
Beginning
I had signed up to do the advanced class in printmaking with digital content at City Lit lead by course leader Rolina Blok.
Needing to find what theme I was going to work on I found inspiration in a photograph of my mother standing at the kitchen sink in the 1950’s.
It seems to be a quintessential image of a woman’s role in the 1950’s and sparked my imagination. How could I use this image of my mother in my work?
It’s already abstract, it appears I need to distance myself somehow to make my work.
I visited a flea market in Paris in December 2019. Somehow I’d found out there was a stall there selling old photographs. At first I’d felt uneasy using found images of unknown people but some friends who run a cafe and gallery down the road told me they often bought photographs like this from boot sales.
I bought some amazing images to use.
So many questions about these images, who are these people, how did their photographs end up in a flea market, didn’t their families want them anymore?
I’m fascinated by them, my choice of image seemed to be mostly of women.
I started to visit some car boot sales in London and found some gems. These images are taken from a photo album I found in Pimlico, they look like they come from the 1920’s.
