More Xerox Transfer Skillage

I’m continuing to work with the xerox transfer method on my prints. On these, I did a base print of flowers painted on the plate, trying to recreate the feel from this February Photoshop piece (eg, be inspired by…):

I printed out some of the same flowers using Photoshop brushes, onto a separate sheet of clean 11×17 paper, just in black and white. I used the gum arabic to protect the image and get it ready to suck up the ink. I mixed inks to complement those I used in the studio over the weekend on my nice glass plate. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love my home studio? Everything right at my fingertips. Aaahhhhh). I didn’t have Daniel Smith quinacridone red, so I tried to match as closely as possible the blue and pink, but they are different hues than what we worked with at Aurobora. That’s okay. I think the slight difference accidentally adds more to the piece. The inks I mixed yesterday are more purple than blue, and more coral than pink. I printed a couple of times with the flowers as a xerox transfer onto the print itself and then printed the residual inks left on the xerox transfer onto a piece of heavier art paper. Then, I cut out a couple of those flowers from the art paper and added them to the print using the chine colle method, with a light layer of ink over half of the print. I added the eye with the xerox transfer method, separately.

This set of transfers went really well – I am just about over getting any ghosting of the ink around the image by carefully applying ink with either a brush or brayer. The brayer does seem to be better at “pushing” the ink down into the grooves of the image and the sponge removal is going well. I was careful to lightly keep brushing the sponge over the transfer to remove all the little boogers of ink that seem to ball up. In bed last night (while dreaming?) I thought of an improvement: I’ve been putting the paper with the image down right onto my work table which has a large piece of plexiglass on it as a protection over the zinc top. This works well in that the water on the paper while I’m sponging it holds the image firmly in place on the tabletop, but then when I go to lift the paper to move it to the print, it can sometimes tear because the paper is so wet and delicate from having been brushed quite a bit with the sponge.

So, last night I thought I could position a transparency under the image first. I have a bunch of those, because now with Powerpoint, we don’t use transparencies and overhead projectors. I could then just move the transparency to my print on the press bed, being careful to line up any edges – even the smallest thickness of the transparency can create a line on the print, depending on how I put it through the press. Also, I think I will use a clean plexi plate over the top of the whole print area with the clean newsprint paper as padding, just to keep things neat and clean when running it through the press.

Here are the two prints then, from last night. They were originally titled “Freebyrd.” I’ll call them Freebyrd 2 and Freebyrd 3.