Today was the printing day with Mary. I was so excited to see what I'd get after a month of staring at these plates everyday as they cured in the daylight on the press in the kitchen.
It's an amazing process. You have to get everything ready, ink rolled out, paper prepped etc and then you can take the gum arabic off the plate. Once you've done this you have to keep the plate damp otherwise it will start filling in and printing black. Mary let a little corner do this but the demonstrated how with a sponge and water she was able to remove it with a slightly harder scrub.
Several of us had a common problem - prints becoming increasingly dark very quickly. I tried adding citric acid and gum arabic to my wiping water which works for the other types of lithography I've tried but to no avail here. With every print pulled the image became darker and the marks less and less defined.
This was my test plate, I think this is the third impression I took and you can see how all the areas that are meant to be white are filling in. I was really pleased by the tiny black edges to the cuts I made - that's terribly effective!
Here are the 4 impressions from this plate - two on wet Somerset, the first two were taken on dry shoji.
This was a plate that I put tusche on all over, in an attempt to see if I could create something that resembles clouds. The bottom two images have a second layer of ink on them after I'd cut away some of the lino. They were printed dry on shoji which didn't render results as good as the wet Somerset.
You can really see the progressive darkening in this series:
I also made one much larger plate. Again, it darkened dramatically - this is the first & 5th pull:
It's a really interesting process that I need to play with a lot more to fully understand. Mary pulled 8 prints from her plate, and the whites were still white at the 8th pull so it's definitely possible. Mary is pretty sure that the problem lies in the application of the gum arabic for curing - the layers were too thin and too much was buffed away. I need to have another go and make sure that gum layer is much thicker (but not too thick or it cracks).
I haven't really managed to get the reticulation printing as I wanted to in any of these tests. I really like the variety in the mark making between the materials in the larger print though. The drawing ink looks like a dip pen and the crayons really come through. The rubbing ink is great for those smears and smudges, it's just the tusche that's really disappointing me. I'm pleased that all three of the crayons worked - with the polyplate only the really hard one works and that's a bit temperamental. The leaf I inked up in oil bas ink and printed very faintly has worked too which is exciting.
I really rather like the image I made with the circular log ends at one side. I think I might see if I can sketch out a similar composition to have another go with this.
The afternoon of the session was meant to be spent cutting into the lino and over printing the lithographic layer. I half heartedly started this on the tusche only plate but couldn't really get enthusiastic about it. This was always the part of the course which I didn't really care about. I know enough about how reduction lino works, I just wanted to learn all about the lithographic marks possible on lino from the course. I also hadn't really planned any plates that could be reduced. It was bad planning on my part, but also I think shows what I was really interested in - the lithographic possibilities. Now that I've tried it I can design a reduction or a multi-plate print that could incorporate some of what I have learned.