Wednesday, December 9, 2015

solar plate etching A la poupée





just doing some experimentation with spot inking very small plates.
this plate is only 2 x 2 inches (50 x 50 mm). It is a solar plate with a pen and ink drawing of a chickadee I exposed onto it. Here's what happened:

  • I applied caligo carbon black first and wiped back
  • then using tiny rolled up felt dabbers applied on Akua intaglio pthalo blue, red oxide and burnt umber. Spot wiped these with thin tissue and tip of my pinky finger.
  • The first pass looked interesting but the black in the bird wasn't reading well. Cleaned and inked the plate again in black.
  • Carefully set plate into the paper where it had slightly embossed and flipped it over on the press bed and ran this through a second time. Bird emerged much better with the additional black and thankfully the plate and print were lined up perfectly, otherwise I would have gotten a double image.
  • Not sure how the got a textural effect in the blue background...maybe water drops on the paper, the way the ink was wiped? None the less I am not objecting to it...gives an interesting background effect.