Thursday pressure..........

Today has been a set of challenges for me. I am so glad that we have 26 letters in the alphabet as by the end of my printing session I was at plan E!!

Yesterday I mono-printed my pages for my book and today was the day I was going to print my book cloth for my front and back covers. Throughout the week at Yellowstone I had been collecting flowers and various leaves. I love looking at nature and the intricate patterns.

I started off by trying to use magic foam that I had brought from home. The instructions told me that I only had to heat up the foam and then press my desired object into the hot foam. After trying multiple times of heating it on the hot plate and burning myself I resorted to using a hairdryer. Another disaster was about to strike. I had forgotten that my image was inverted so that when it was printed, it printed the image but also a square of black as well. This is not what I wanted.

Practice prints on newsprint

Plan B then came into action. I started to trim the foam into my desired shape. When cutting it, I found it hard to cut it into the shape around the print. I printed it again. However I found that because the room was warm my image had started to reshape into the original foam. After lots of frustration and grunts I decided to give up.

The foam printed shapes were still not working!!

Another plan. Another letter. Plan C. Still wanting to use my collected foliage I had the idea of printing with them on to my book cloth. The colour of my book cloth was a tan colour. I wanted something quite subtle. Practicing on newsprint I found it really difficult to use them as I had kept them in a bag for over a week and some of the leaves became very fragile and were hard to handle. Trying both a brayer and a paintbrush to paint them it became impossible with getting ink everywhere and not getting the delicate prints that I wanted.

Plan D came to a head. I spoke to one of my tutors and asked for her advice. She suggested that I roller a glass paint with ink, place the leaves, flowers, etc and put them through the press so that they were evenly distributed with ink. I tried this and worked really well. However I was more inspired by the relief prints that the leaves, etc had made on the glass plate. I had the idea of using these relief prints on to my book cloth. However when I printed on to the book cloth, the brown ink on to the tan coloured book cloth didn’t work as well as I had hoped. I re inked the glass plate again with a darker shade of brown and tried again. The outcome was better but it was still not what I was looking for.

Plan D - relief printed leaves

The final plan arose. Plan E. I had tried everything I could think of from printing with the leaves with both negative and positive shapes. None of it worked how I wanted it to. I then resorted to doing a mono-print on to white book cloth, using another image from my previous Photoshop work.

After all the trials today, I am looking forward to constructing my book tomorrow. 
Rachel Perry

Whilst Rachel had been suffering her trials, Brandon the print tutor from BYU Idaho has spent yesterday regraining some litho stones for a collaborative lithographic print. This is a laborious process, but everyone is eager to have a go and see how it works. Today he is ready to let us make our images on the stone and he has asked each of us to draw or paint an horizon line that we remember from the trip last week. Clare is one of the first to have a go.......

 

Clare was the first to have a go with the lithography painting and drawing media.

                            

More of the group's drawings on a much bigger stone.

                                          

Clare, Sue and Jane working on their remembered skyline landscapes for Brandon's Lithograph

Brandon explaining the sequence and many procedures in the production of a lithograph. 
The images having been painted, Brandon worked late into the evening preparing the plates for printing tomorrow. 

While most of us were busy in the print areas Bill was getting Nathan's help cutting steel hinges in the metalwork area of the sculpture studio

Clare wanted to use 'Letterpress' for the title page of her book and Michael was able to take her to the Letterpress area and explain and assist in producing what she wanted. 

  

The finished title page in Letterpress type.