Here is an etching for the City Music Foundation.
Here are photos of work in progress and some more prints:
See this post for earlier sessions on this project: St Bartholomew the Less – etchings(1)
Here is an etching for the City Music Foundation.
Here are photos of work in progress and some more prints:
See this post for earlier sessions on this project: St Bartholomew the Less – etchings(1)
Here’s a print I made at East London Printmakers yesterday.
It’s a continuation of the project “Strange Landscapes from Wood”, which I started in November 2018, before work for the exhibition and New Year Cards took over.
This print shows a dialogue, or perhaps an exploration. Are they perhaps looking down a tunnel? Or watching a sunset?
This is a chine collé print from a copper etched plate. The paper is thin Japanese paper brought to me by kind friends directly from “Paper Nao” in Tokyo. You can see how the plate was made on this link: Strange landscapes from wood
The plain print, with no chine collé, looks like this:
The coloured bits are placed on top of the plate, glue side up. I’ve described the process on this link: The chine collé process
Here is work in progress:
This morning I made an etching based on a sketch of St Bartholomew the Less.
Here’s the original sketch, which was made from the top of Maggie’s Centre in St Bartholomew’s hospital, by kind permission of the staff of the Centre.
The sketch was to explore the proportions, before making the more detailed watercolour drawings on this post:
I thought the sketch was rather lively and might make a good etching. Here’s the copper plate I made:
And here are some of today’s prints: (click to enlarge)
The plate needs a bit more work I think. The background could be darker and perhaps some shading on the tower itself. My idea is that I will print it with perhaps chine-collé. So I want to keep the design simple.
I just had the morning at the print studio today.
The paper is Chinese paper from Great Art. Numbers 11369 (soft), and 11565 (white, with a slight grid). The ink is Intaglio Printmaker Shop Mix Bone Black. The plate is 10cmx15cm copper plate from Great Art, which I prepared with hard ground 28 June 2018. I used the Rochard press at East London Printmakers.
Update:
14 March 2019 – Chine Collé
On a recent walk in Hoxton, I picked up a piece of wood. Perhaps it was part of a crate. It had interesting grain.
John cut it into smaller pieces with a saw.
I was going to use them as relief blocks. Then I got talking to a fellow printer at East London Printmakers. She suggested I press them into soft ground and make an etching plate. Then I thought I’d use the Albion press to get sufficient pressure.
The technician, Dan, asked if I had aquatint on there, and I hadn’t. Can you put aquatint on top of soft ground? We went off to consult the studio co-ordinator. She said yes, aquatint was good idea.
So here’s the process:
Here’s the result.
Here’s the other block, with chine collé stripes added. I’m not sure which way up it should be. Since this whole session was experimental, I also used some experimental paper from the Vintage Paper Company. They say on the package: “This was made some time between 1969 and 1973 as waterleaf (unsized) printing paper by J Green and Sons (brilliant but now extinct British papermakers). I had it gelatine sized in December 2017 by Two Rivers Paper (brilliant and very much alive and kicking British papermakers” and they ask for feedback. I think it worked really well, and I’m now off to write them an email.
March 2019: I used this plate to make some chine collé prints. See this link:/strange-landscapes-from-wood-2/
My idea was to produce multiple copies of “Towers East” and “Towers West”. These are aquatint plates I prepared a few months ago. This post describes the process to produce the plates: Towers East and Towers West
The Towers are St Mary’s Tower and Peabody Tower, just to the North of the Barbican.
I made 14 reasonable prints, and 2 out-takes. I glued the out-takes into my notebook. I make one page per print session, and record what I did, what paper and ink I used, what worked and what didn’t. This is in an attempt to learn and improve my printing technique.
Here are the 14 reasonable prints, numbered 1 to 14. Numbers 1-13 are on card 20cm by 30cm. This card size is intended as a greeting card. When folded it fits neatly into an A5 envelope. Number 14 is on larger paper. All are for sale, £5 each plus postage. Please contact me by email via the contacts page, or leave a comment on this page. The red writing is on the online image here, not on the print.
Click on an image to enlarge it. It may take a little while to load.
The technique is “chine-collé” which is described here: The chine collé process
Here’s number 13 so you can see the format:
Here is number 14 on the larger paper:
These are all part of my “Towers Project” leading to an exhibition in the Barbican Library February 2019.
I work in the print studio at East London Printmakers. Prints are on Fabriano Unica Paper, using Intaglio Printmaker Bone Black ink. They are printed by hand on the Henderson press. Each print takes about half an hour to print.
This week I made prints of an etching of the Atlas Building. The etchings are based on a sketch I made.
I made 12 prints. Here they are.
They are all for sale! Please let me know if you would like to buy one. All are printed on etching paper “Fabriano Unica”. They are intended to be used as greetings cards. So the print is to the side like this:
They fold in half to make a greeting card which fits in a C5 envelope.
Equally they can be folded in half or cut, and put in a frame size A5.
If you’d like to buy one, please contact me, and say which one you’d like. They are numbered – click the images in the gallery above. £5 each + postage. These are handmade items by me, an amateur printer. Thumb marks, imperfections, ink smudges and other defects reflect the handmade nature of the items and, as they say, “should not be regarded as defects”.
This is all preparation for my “Towers” exhibition in February 2019.
The process I use is “chine collé”. Here are some photos of work in progress:
To see more detail on the process, look at this page, which explains all the stages.
The photos above are in “East London Printmakers” in Stepney, where I do my work.
Here is the original sketch on which the prints are based.
Today I worked on a print of the Atlas Building. This is based on a watercolour I did in March this year in a peregrination around City Road.
Here the hard ground print:
Then aquatint:
This was an aquatint with 6 tones, which is about the maximum I can achieve. On the 4th and 5th dip it’s difficult to see what I’m doing.
These pictures are postcard-size, with the intention of making cards.
Here’s the test plate print.
I’m in the question about whether the aquatint needs more work. I thought it did when I first saw it, but now I’m not so sure. It isn’t as dark as the photo looks. Comments welcome.
Aquatint and test plate on Khadi handmade paper. Hard ground print on handmade paper from Paperchase. Printing done at East London Printmakers. Ink is Intaglio Printmaker “Shop Mix Bone Black” from a tube. Etching on 10cm x 15cm copper plate using Edinburgh Etch.
Here are the copper plates:
This week I experimented with hard and soft ground. Here is “The Absinthe Table”, etching on copper plate.
It’s based on a sketch I made at the Hotel de France, Vaud, Switzerland. They have a collection of absinthes for tasting.
Walking on the way to the print studio I decided I would do two colours. Furthermore, I thought that the second colour, with black, should be green, as absinthe is sometimes called the “la fée verte”. Rooting about in the leftovers box at the Print Studio I found some green ink.
The long process of making the plates took all morning. I watched the rain fall into the canal. Perhaps some of this atmosphere went into the print. Making a two-colour print means:
The potential for error is great. The most obvious error is to put the second plate in up-side-down.
I printed the plates in the afternoon. The error that happened first time round was that the green ink didn’t print at all. Not a dot. Examining the tube very carefully, reading the writing between the splodges on the tube, I saw that it was “block-printing ink”. Lesson: block printing ink does not work for etching/intaglio process. OK.
This is why the background is brown, using the Charbonnel etching ink which I had brought with me. This is very reliable, but is brown not green.
Here is the single colour black, one plate in hard and soft ground.
Here is an out-take, the very first print of this series. The bottles are in hard-ground only, and the registration is totally off. But perhaps that weird dislocation is appropriate for a picture of an absinthe table.
Here’s a sketch of the absinthe table from February this year:
Here are etchings based on a drawing I did from outside Godfrey House, in the St Luke’s estate, Bath St, EC1V.
This one is done in the new brown ink I bought: “Terre d’Ombre Brulée”
This is aquatint.
Here’s what the hard ground etch was like, before the aquatint.
Here’s the work in progress:
Yesterday I did an etching based on a sketch I made of the Cheesegrater and St Katharine Cree.
This is a post-card sized etching on copper plate, printed by the technique called Chine collé. Japanese paper is the coloured background, and is printed and glued to Fabriano Unica, all in one process. It’s a bit tricky, but gives a good result, I think. The Japanese paper takes the ink very well, and provides the coloured background.
The plate is made using a hard-ground etch, then aquatint. Hard-ground etch means I put a varnish on the plate, then draw the picture in the varnish, so revealing lines of bare copper. Then I dip the plate in acid for 20 minutes. The acid attacks the bare copper and makes lines. Then if I print it, it looks like this:
The next stage is aquatint, to make the tones. Aquatint is nothing to do with water, and nothing to do with colour. The name is misleading. The plate goes in a box, where I’ve turned a handle to make clouds of fine rosin. The rosin drops on the plate like rain. Then it’s annealed with a gas burner. Now there are lots of tiny dots in a random pattern on the plate. The skill now is to paint and dip the plate, so as to get the tones. The longer the plate stays in the acid, the blacker the tone. But if you leave it too long the acid bites off all the dots and the tone is light again.
The picture has 5 tones and plate tone. The darkest tone was in the acid for 4 minutes.
Here is the plate being inked up:
I did the printing on the Henderson press at East London Printmakers.