A moment on the gelatin.

I haven't gotten to play much with gelatin prints since making those first attempts.

I did however spend a weekend over at my aunt's, and while I was there decided to make a plate and go to gung ho the next day.

I mixed up the gelatin in the usual recipe, 4c water to 1/3c gelatin - food grade gelatin I ordered off line. I have 5 pounds of the stuff which will stretch WAY farther than I thought it would. So the game is on.

I pour the gelatin a bit at a time stirring it into the simmering water, when almost all the chunks are dissolved and it's like a light shade of piss yellow- I pour it out into a jello roll pan. I leave it on the counter overnight to cure.

Now the next day, when we went to get it out of the pan it stuck like GLUE! Worse, when we attempted to gently, with splayed fingers, tug it out, it folded and broke. crack after crack. Next we tried heating up the underside of the pan with a hair dryer. No difference. Eventually we settled on prying it out of the pan using the hairdryer to blow air up under it creating lift- think a sheet on the line on a windy day. We managed a few decent sized chunks. and played with them- but they were too soft to take much printing and eventually we played with cookie cutters to make shapes.

The ink also acted differently on it, being more water-y the ink slid off it instead of having nice grip. The Speedball inks I'd expect that of- I haven't had much luck with them being sticky or opaque. The Daniel Smith inks I bought are Fantastic (unfortunately their price? less than fantastic).

Anyway- The real question is- why was my plate so awful?

Let's investigate the differences between the first [;ate i made and this last one in process:


Plate One:
4 cups water using liquid measure + 1/3 c gelatin solid measure. When combined over heat, resulting in an amber like color, a medium yellow. Then poured on a normal cookie sheet, let it set, then popped it into a fridge over night. It was almost room temperature by the time we used it next day but it was rubber-y and the edges and bottom had pulled away form the pan.

Plate Two: 4c water- using a solid measure. 1/3 c solid measure. when combined made a light yellow color, poured into a jelly roll pan (higher, more vertical sides) and placed on a counter.

My hypothesis is that I ended up with more water in plate two, and because I didn't stick it in a dry fridge to dehydrate over night it didn't get that ideal rubbery texture.

the first gelatin prints!

Would that I had a studio to do these every day, they are so fun and easy to get really creative with.

Prints from Senior Show:

The prints that were sold (YAY!) are gone forever- I will post pictures of their brothers and sisters soon. Since my runs are inconsistent, each print has a little something special- its own character; a slightly differing color scheme usually. The point of doing an edition is to have the prints all be the same- it's a skill I am still working on, also the reason I trend towards monotypes as a printmaker.

Aeonium






Sempervivum





Dawn in the Garden



Hen and Chicks





Lithops

a drive-by tour of my senior show works

Dawn in the garden
Intaglio- 4 plate- akua inks. Quick to work up and print. rives lightweight.



gelatin print with woodblock over it. watercolor added. rives lightweight.
This one was a huge experiment. Awesome fun making gelatin prints with my teacher Elizabeth Cameron (a fantastic printmaker) and the woodcut was done a little later.


This ones my favorite. It's echeverias- I did it with the careful layering of transparent inks. The dark blues and greens are all the same color grey- overlayed over different base hues it looks like several different colors. I blew my own world a little with this one.



This one is a set of about 20 monoprints. The edition failed when I couldn't decide how to resolve the print and kept niggling away at the colors, printing and reprinting the layers. The carving took what felt like a lifetime and made me need a break from woodcuts- its 2'x2'.







These are some paintings bonding with my prints. I sold two prints all told- thanks to whoever bought the one and to Kathy who bought my favorite. Featured in the photo far off are another etching and a few more relief prints.

The show featured 9 prints in all and only two paintings. So I took away a painting major with a printmaking minor- the first one at the NHIA- and had two paintings to show for it. Needless to say I enjoyed my minor more. I am looking around for ways to incorporate them with each other. The more I get into monotypes the more I see the link between painting and printmaking shrinking.

The NHIA Minumental Exhibition

Every year my college-The New Hampshire Institute of Art- does an exhibition of 2"x2" artwork- this year I did a cute little relief print- I hand painted and printed each little one so they are each unique and different. I think they look cool together in a triptiych, there are several that I like. The print is a little Echeveria plant that has gently rouged leaf tips. The colors and rose-like design remind me of vintage type tattoos a little bit. Sadly, due to snow and a not-so-public rain date to drop off submissions these little guys didn't make it into the show. Maybe next year!



These little prints coincide with my current body of work focused on my beloved house plants, of which I have at least twenty. I am going through a phase of life where, bereft of pets, I have taken on plants as a kind of overt obsession. I own many succulents and know how to take care of anything from a tropical pitcher plant to grass. I know when to plant and fertilize black eyes susans, and I know when it is time to begin watering your lithops in the spring. I think the first little relief print is my favorite for its subtle pink and changes in green.
Check out some plant related paintings and in progress work at the Painting tab above, or if you too are a plant hoarder check out my blog- occasionally updated with new plant facts I have found scouring the internet, updates on how mine are doing and new additions/the occasional death.

Electronic dependency series.

The year I did these my teacher was an "your art has to be socially relevent or else why make it" kind of guy. Sadly, mailboxes wouldn't be cutting it anymore. These pieces had to be introspective and deep and most importantly linked.

I chose to do our relationship with electricity 1) after reading the book American Gods by Neil Gaimen the second time and loving the portrayal of the 'New Gods' of technology and 2) an incident where I left my phone at home and all hell broke loose because people couldn't get a hold of me for three hours. THREE HOURS is apparently enough time for all my extracurricular activities to explode, a frequent texter to stalwartly believe I no longer love her and my mom to get "worried" when I didn't immediately return her call. It was at that moment I realized how insanely dependent we are on electricity and being "hooked up" and "plugged in".

This first image is an Intaglio/ Silkscreen, an etching combined with a screen print over it. It's actually a waterbased ink silkscreen over an oil based etching print and everyone is freaking out that this will cause cracking on their own work, but mine hasn't seemed to crackle of at all yet. It has a 'St. Anthony tormented by Demons' kind of demon in it. It's an awesome engraving by Martin Schongauer- here you see the little guys and a super bored looking St. Anthony-


I loved drawing him, and at the same time I was in figure drawing doing bones and things, so I incorporated everything I was learning at the time into it.



For this one, a silkscreen, I struggled so much getting the colors to go that I kind of flunked it. The ones that lined up were cool,I liked the design idea and I loved using the cord to make an object. My friend had to help me with the dot matrix work in Adobe Photoshop as I am technologically defunct.



This last is a summer removed from the others, keeping with the theme of electrical cords being used to create form or tie and bind us to an abstract thing like electricity. I used a '70s palette with school bus orange and avocado green type colors- it reminded me of ugly hippie wallpaper. I was in an Escher fan faze, and I did Escher-esque plugs that can stack infinitely. I love it, and I still use pretty much these colors in many of my prints today, often layered differently for different effects.


this one's 18"x24", with only five layers. It still needs some retouching with a brush and some Easy Wipe and Cad Red ink, the reds aren't what I wanted them to be.

More Old Prints

There was once a mailbox theme.

This is a lithograph.



Lithography dates back to the mid 1800's and was extremely popular for advertising uses through the early 20th century. Your Newspaper of Choice is still printed this way.

The basic principle behind lithography is that oil repels water. The technique involves a great many steps, especially if you use a Litho stone (which I did not- litho plates are a lot more portable however, do not erase like a stone) so I will not go over them here. Just know that in essence, you put oil-based marks down, then magical steps later put ink on the oil marks you made, the ink sticks only to the oil marks, then print those onto a surface (paper, fabric etc).

This process really drives home what museum docents and cave enthusiasts everywhere have always told you- your hands and fingers have oils. And when you touch things those oils transfer from your hands to whatever you touched. In that same way those guys on CSI pick up finger prints off of wood floors and wine glasses, you too will be amazed when you roll on the ink to find that your print has perfect fingerprints or the classic (!) hand-and-wrist-resting-to-draw combo right in the middle of your glorious portrait or landscape.So don't forget! No touchy.

Revisiting Old Prints

This first print is a relief print.

A relief print is made by carving out or indenting areas of a flat surface-commonly used are linoleum, materials such as EZ-cut and different kinds of wood- and then rolling ink or pigment on them and pressing that ink onto a paper or fabric. The resulting picture or marks is a mirror image of the picture/marks carved out of the flat surface; only the ink left raised up on the platform of the flat surface will show when the paper is pressed to it. In this type of Printmaking, it is important to either plan meticulously and carve meticulously, or to go with the flow of your mistakes. It is sometimes difficult to fill in your accidental gouges.

Below is an example of what a reduction relief block looks like after the final layer has been printed. In a reduction relief, a block is printed, then carved, then printed again as many times as desired. wherever you care out the previous layer shows through. This is my favorite method of printmaking so far.



This is the print from that block. The final layer was the red on the tips of the mail chutes.



Here they are together:



See how the print is the reverse of the block?

Welcome!

Welcome to the printmaking blog. Here we talk about techniques, colors, prep, and the things that make each fine art print unique.