Author: lauramchugh

I’ve been agonizing for a week now about what to do to finish these two prints I did last weekend at Aurobora. I was so happy with use of the contrasting paper, the pages from the Ancient Mythology book and use of the gelatin print I had made of peony leaves while in MN (see below, ghost print from plate with peony chine colle). As nice as they were, though, I felt the pieces needed something black in a line drawing that related to ancient mythology.

The text of the book pages (see above, Amenophis I) relates to the pharoh Amenophis, so I found an image of clay pottery from his tomb (courtesy of google images!) and drew it in pencil. I did the xerox transfer method with some black-gray ink and voila!

They both now feel complete.

It was a bit painful, I’ll admit, to now have two days I couldn’t work in my studio. I had meetings in San Francisco and helping a friend pack to move. All of these were delightful activities, and I yearned to be here working on the press too. I was able to do a little bit in the evenings, mostly thinking about and reading on how to finish up this piece. I am referring myself to Places and Spaces by Gaston Bachelard. Specifically, the final chapter which is on the phenomenology of round/sphere.

My engineering schooling didn’t include classes in philosophy, wherein I might have been more exposed to the meaning of round and it’s relation to our essential being. Reading about this makes my head hurt – a little like when Clinton was parsing “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” though this work is entirely different subject matter.

A bit of explanation about the process: It started with a line drawing of two enmeshed gears that I found on-line in 2007. I had just taken the first print class at Aurobora and wanted to learn how to transfer simple line drawings to paper. We never got to it in that class and the written instructions given to me were daunting, so I never went back to it. Then, it was demonstrated in class last weekend using this drawing. Deb made one print onto nice paper, and a second onto the graph paper I brought that had another small print of a sphere on it. I chine colle’d those onto vellum, following the example of Delacroix, who made this beautiful chine colle onto vellum from a drawing he had done in 1828. I thought the vellum would be a nice choice of base papers given the subject matter of gears.

I used the plate I found at Aurobora that has the tape in an arc to lay in turquoise and green opposing arcs that gently formed a circle and then used xerox transfer to put an image of a tank from the refinery that I took a few weeks ago (Tank 302). I added some color to the xerox transfer and reprinted it, then added an overall background color of the reds and pinks.

Here is a detail shot:

Valentine’s Day Girls

This print is based on an image I did in Photoshop on Valentine’s Day 2009. I worked up the backgound at Aurobora over the weekend using a selection of textures to mimic the Photoshop stamps I used in the original. This monotype has the largest xerox transfer I’ve done so far, the two girls side by side in dark teal.

Here’s the Photoshop version:

With this print, I tried the idea I mentioned yesterday of putting the clean transparency sheet underneath the xerox transfer before prepping it (wiping ink off with the sponge). One thing I didn’t plan for was that when you wipe the transfer to remove excess ink, it will immediately stick to anything that wasn’t first coated with the gum arabic. So, it smeared all over the sides of the image, on the part of the transparency that wasn’t covered by paper.

The idea was that the paper would be nicely held in the safety of the transparency with some border to allow me to cleanly pick it up, but just the opposite happened – the ink on that part of the transparency was a mess. It got all over my hands and then that is a recipe for disaster when you move to the original print with it’s nice tidy white border. One little speck of ink there and it’s all over. So – scratch that idea. I’ll just prep the xerox transfer, go wash my hands or deglove, and then transfer the paper to a nice clean rigid plate that gives me the control I need to move the image to the print. The nice thing is that all that water in the process helps the paper stick to the transparency, plate, etc. Water is my friend. I also found that I really need to make sure the receiving paper is dampened, and that there isn’t an excess of ink on the transfer.

Those darker areas of the skirts had too much ink built up and the paper of the original transfer stuck to the print. I was able to use a razor blade edge to pick it up and tear it off (like a price tag off a plate or glass), but it could have been a disaster under different circumstances. I added a rose that I had printed on vellum to the upper right corner using gel medium and the press to lock it in place. The press is better than any stack of books for getting something really glued down. I’m happy with this print.

More Analysis of Ancient Mythology

These three prints were a series with no further work after Sunday. I used a found plate at Aurobora that had some tape stuck to it in an arc. For the first print, I used chine colle to put down a section from a gelatin print I’d done in MN a couple of weeks ago with a map from that Analysis of Ancient Mythology book. The plate was painted and I think I created what for me is a better technique for getting a nice thin layer of ink on the plate evenly. I used a brush with some Olivera oil in the ink to thin it a bit. Brush over the plate just like doing a painting. Cover evenly. Then, use the brayer to really even it out. This works better for me than the brayer with ink directly to the plate because I can’t seem to get a nice even layer with the brayer without it being thicker. I’m learning to lighten up on the brayer which also helps.

The ghost image and a second print with more paper from the MN project were done on the second and third prints. I have one more series of three prints that are in a skin/flesh tone to finish up. I probably won’t get to those until late nights the rest of this week, or Saturday.

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.

Wow – what a great workshop this weekend at Aurobora Press. This was the second of five weekend workshops between June and October with Master Printer Deb Sibony. My goal in the work this weekend was to take pieces I had made in Photoshop back in February and recreate them as prints. The Photoshop process is, to me, the electronic equivalent of printmaking. I can take layers in Photoshop and fiddle with the opacity and put them under and over other layers and images.

This is the image I made in February, called K-Bessel Function in Terms of the Confluent Hypergeometric Function:

I am elated to have finally learned chine colle and the xerox transfer method of transferring images to the paper. I worked with pages from an old book called Analysis of Ancient Mythology that was published in 1807 – yes 202 years ago! The book was published in quarto style, meaning that four pages, front and back, were printed at one time, then folded to make a quarto. Twenty-seven of these quartos made up the entire book (27×4 pages). Interestingly, the copy I purchased did not have the tops of the pages split, so the book was unreadable. I unbound the book and spread the pages out to make beautiful, printed on paper which I will use for art.

Some of these I used today for chine colle to the paper. I’ll post photos of that work tomorrow, when the light is better.

For now, here is a print I made using the xerox transfer method. We also found the cafe that serves the fabulous turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce called HRD Coffee Shop. The cafe has been there for 47 years and takes its name from Human Resource Development because it was across the street from the Social Security Administration offices at one time and was where anyone who needed to get back into the workforce was directed.