This Photo Transfer class I’m taking at the Pacific Art League, taught by Julia Nelson-Gal yesterday was really good. Thankfully, Julia was sympathetic to me not being there next week, so she shifted the things we will do around a bit. Instead of doing the xerox transfer, we did solar plates. We took our own photos and Julia first walked us step-by-step through the modifications needed to make a solar plate in Photoshop. Everyone had their laptop there and we all worked the steps together. That was fun and you know how I love Photoshop, so learning that set of skills was important.
Then, we printed our photos onto this stuff that looks like a transparency, but is a special material with emulsion on one side called Pictorico. You take that little image and trim it down to the plate size (we did 5x7s) and then go into a semi-darkroom. In there, Julia had this box she’d made with UV lights. You put the transparency on the plate which also has this emulsion stuff on it – a plastic layer that is light sensitive – and you expose it, like you would do a photo in a real darkroom. Once that plate has been exposed, which only takes about 90 sec, then you put it in water and rinse and gently brush the surface with a mushroom cleaning brush. The plastic that was not exposed rinses off, leaving this barely visible image of divits in the areas where your image was exposed. Those divits are where the ink will take later. Some of us with darker areas on our photos used an aquatint screen to lay in a very very slight (not visible to the naked eye) layer of dots that prevents the darker areas from “biting.”
We had some challenges with what side had emulsion on it, but we figured it out. Then we went back upstairs to the print room and printed our plates. You take the same sort of ink we’ve been using at Aurobora, and mix it a little differently for what is basically etching. Julia showed us how the ink is supposed to look as far as the flow of the ink on the mix knife. You use a little hard plastic scraperto scrape in back and forth over the plate. Ink goes down into the tiny little places where the plastic was burned out and then you wipe the plate with that stiff tarletan (think stiff cheesecloth). I don’t think cheesecloth would work here, unless its been stiffened by use with ink. All this has to be done carefully so as not to scratch that plastic plate, though the UV light has hardened it somewhat, but it is like any other plate – a heavy material or an accidental brush up against something sharp will leave a mark.
Here’s my transparency:
Here’s my solar plate:
And here’s my final print: