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September 03, 2006
a full day of printing
I'm still working on first press runs on more new prints from the same two woodblocks; just a few more full days in the print shop and I'll be ready to start cutting more wood out of the blocks; each of the prints below will need one more run to fill up the other side, and then I've got about thirty sheets of kitakata to print as well.
First I made 15 of these. It's basically the same as the prints I showed you two days ago, except that two days ago I was showing you two separate prints that I photoshopped together. When I looked at them on screen I really liked the way they looked together and made my decisions about how to orient the images based on how they looked next to each other, even though I was only putting them together like that for the blog. Then when Peter saw the image he said that would make a good finished print on its own; since this was exactly in line with my own feelings about how these two images worked together, I went with it. When the beige is dry I'll put the blue on the other side, then pull out some to leave as a finished edition and continue printing on the rest.
Since this was working out so well I thought I'd try the same thing with last week's green and yellow prints:
I made 15 of these also. Unfortunately, none can be left as is because there is some nasty crap all through my yellow that I will have to cover up with more printing. I couldn't figure out where it was coming from but it looked like gray-blue dots spread randomly through the ink. I checked my tools and my stencil and thoroughly cleaned my block twice and still it kept coming up. I have a theory about what it is but I only thought of it later: when I was mixing the yellow there was a little bit of something blue-ish on top of the white ink. I assumed that some slob had left blue ink in the white and didn't worry about it, knowing that there was hardly any and it would mix into my colour and disappear. But I think it may be cobalt drier that some slob left in the white ink, and because it was on top it was too dry to mix in properly so it distributed itself in little chunks (I've seen drier do that before). Arrgh. So listen, assholes, clean your fucking utensils so you don't wreck other people's work. (I suppose I should have cleaned up the ink and mixed some new, but I'm stubborn, and also the ink looked totally clean, so I didn't think the problem was in there).
Still, by the end of the day I had a pretty satisfying sight in front of me:
A drying rack filled with new prints, all neatly stacked. Yeah!
I also ran a huge amount of cotton linters through the hollander beater, enough to fill three totes and a bucket. They're all crammed into my studio right now, so I may make paper tomorrow instead of printing. Depends which shop is less filled with pesky undergrads*, I guess.
*they're not really pesky, and they certainly have every right to be there. I'm just territorial, and a bitch.
Posted by jodi at September 3, 2006 08:20 PM | categories: in the studio