Fall 2016 Printmaking Assignments

Hi friends,

After much procrastination, I finally decided to take a printmaking class, and i'm so glad I did because I think I found my happy medium. Here are some assignments that I completed for the class last year, along with a little bit of information about each print. If you have any questions or comments feel free to email at me at chinagjones@hotmail.com, or leave a comment below.
Enjoy!

Assignment 1- Hard ground line etching with aquatint.

I used a photo of a leopard that my mom took in Africa. For this one I etched all the spots, I think if I were to do this again I would have used aquatint for the spots. Aquatint is a process used for getting all those nice gray values. This plate was over melted, meaning the dust was melted for to long onto the plate, leaving a grainier texture, thus I wasn't able to control the values as well. It's all a learning curve, overall it turned out okay.

Assignment 2- Soft ground Line drawing, and chine colle (pasted papers)

This was a fun assignment, I also used a photo reference for this one, mostly because I wanted to learn the technique and not spend so much time coming up with a concept. Also, I love drawing birds and nature. Soft ground has a bit of a lighter look to it. With a soft ground drawing, you transfer the image onto the tracing paper and then place the tracing paper on the plate, and start shading/drawing your image. By drawing with harder and softer lead, you can control the line weight, also the more pressure you draw with the harder the line.

Part 2- Chine colle

Chine colle is the process of printing a thin piece of paper over an image, to give it a different background color. chine-colle translates from french Chine=tissue  Colle- Pasted or glued

as you can see, I pasted down a light colored tissue paper over my image. if I pasted down a darker sheet of paper, you wouldn't see the image as clearly.




For this image I went for a less traditional approach, and cut out the different pieces of paper to be pasted. This is very time consuming, but you get interesting results. also you have to be fast, and get all the pieces down before the glue dries up.

Assignment 3- Linocut- is a technique in which a sheet of linoleum is used for a relief surface. By cutting into the linoleum, you get white areas and anything that is left uncut will be black.

I enjoy taking pictures of flowers, and making art pieces out of them. They are very interesting to look at. This one was fun to make. But maybe next time I would have done the inverse of this 

image because the lines in the flower petal are very delicate.

Linocut with a color rollup. I added some yellow to this one. I rolled out a yellow color onto plexiglass, and then wiped away all the areas where I didn't want color and transferred onto the print.

Assignment 4- Monoprint- monoprinting is a form of printmaking where lines can only be made once, you can't make multiple originals like most printmaking. There are many materials you can use for monoprinting. I used a plexiglass plate to draw an outline of my image, and then added one black color on the reverse side of the plate. After the ink was applied to the plate, I wiped away areas for highlights, and grays. I used tissue, and q-tips for thinner lines. I learned, that it's very hard to control the outcome of the image with monoprinting, and not easy to fix mistakes.

Monoprint 1

Monoprint Ghost- A ghost image can be made by placing a sheet of paper over the printed image to get a second print. I then did a color rollup over the ghost image. You can even do multiple ghost images, and adjust the pressure of the press to make it tighter. I managed to get a third one, but you'll have to message me if you REALLY want to see it.

Assignment 5- Solar plate Etching- Solar plate etching is a lot like developing photos traditionally. First you have a solar plate, which you then expose a transparency of your image onto using a very bright light. We had a fancy exposure machine in class to make it. The trick is to have a really good image, with multiple values, that aren't to close together. I used a photo I took in Corciano, Italy.

Corciano, Italy- Solar plate etching - S/P

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If you have any questions or comments, or you want to say hello then shoot me an email at chinagjones@hotmail.com.