I did some preliminary research on the topic, but somehow wasn’t able to locate artists that employed back drawing. Then by chance, I came across Paul Gauguin’s prints and discovered that one, he was seen as one of the groundbreaking artists for transfer drawing and two, there was currently an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York: Paul Gauguin Metamorphoses. So I decided to focus this research point on only a single artist and take the opportunity to make an exhibition visit.

I’m currently on a mini-pause to the printmaking course because working towards assignment 4 of the watercolour course, but I couldn’t postpone the visit any longer because the exhibition was soon to close. I wasn’t happy about switching between courses because it meant that I went with my mind entangled in a different art medium, but then it turned out to be no problem at all. I am so glad I went because the exhibition was so exciting and inspiring. It consisted of three large gallery rooms full of Paul Gauguin’s artwork made in relation to his travels to Tahiti. There were many wood prints, monotypes and oil transfer drawings, but also some oil paintings, wood reliefs and sculptures, and some ceramic works.

I made many notes and even a sketch from one of the transfer drawings that I found particularly interesting. I’ll try to summarize the main points and observations.

Wood prints

I don’t remember to have seen real woodprints (not reproductions) like these before. They have a special quality, very rough and “primitive” and I think this effect was intended by Gauguin. They all show the marks of the tools that were used, and they are not polished to fine detail but left raw and vigorous. The prints are delicate and atmospheric nevertheless.

I discovered interesting details about how the tools were used. Gauguin seemed to have carved very fine guiding lines to outline the motif, and then carved away those areas not to be printed. But for carving these larger areas he used a broader tool and did not get exactly to the edges of the fine carved lines. This resulted in very subtle double contours in some woodprints, and I really liked the effect.

There was a sparceness in his linework which corresponded extremely well to the motif. For example, he made prints of night scenes lit by an open fire. The figures and objects were indicated only by a line contour. So most of the wooden area was inked and printed in dark, with light lines to indicate the figures, resulting in very subtly lit images.

In one print showing a female figure, I wondered how he achieved the soft shadings that separated the two legs, without using a clear cut line. He had carved away part of the backgroun, and here the legs were set off a white background. It looked to me as if he had sanded off the front area of the left leg up to the middle. In this area, the dark ink was lightened up to a medium tone. The right leg began where the ink was very dark again. The method was also used to set off parts of the dark figure against the dark background. This was very impressive and I found the technique quite inventive.

Gauguin’s prints in the first series presented, the Noa Noa suite, were quite uneven, but tremendously atmospheric. By contrast, prints from the woodblocks later made by his artist friend Louis Roy were technically “superior” in that they had very evenly printed forms with clear contours and clear colour separations. The interesting thing was that Gauguin’s rough and seemingly imperfect prints had much more character and appeal than Roy’s versions. I think this is very important to consider when making prints – the strive for technical perfection is not necessarily something that improves the overall result. More subtle ways of inking and printing can greatly enhance the individual character of a print.

Ceramics

There were several ceramic objects exposed. I particular liked a vase, “decorated with Breton Scenes” (1886-87). It was about 45 cm high and 12 cm in diameter, made of dark brown clay, and colourfully glazed with a painted motif. The top and bottom rims of about 8 and 4 cm were dark in transparent glaze, while the middle area of around 30 cm had a white background. In this areas there were painted figures and trees. Especially nice was how the trees extended above the area of the white background to the top rim, like an element running out of the picture space. This detail was recurring in the so-called zincograph prints Gauguin made at the same time, the Volpini suite

Zincographs: The Volpini suite

These were a series of prints in yet another printmaking technique Gauguin experimented with. I think it was something like drypoint etching combined with partial inking/wiping of a printing plate – monoprinting on a zinc plate, maybe? These were printed on yellow paper and several had unusual printing areas, for example a rectangle having two edges rounded off by 1/3 of the image area, or another which was shaped like a part of a cylinder laid out flat (see picture). Gauguin seemed to have experimented with image formats, or maybe it was the result of having only odd-shaped zinc plates available. Other prints had parts of the motif extending over the actual printing rectangle. The overall impression was really nice.

I realized that until now I had taken my rectangle printing plates as granted and that there’s much more potential for experimentation with differently shaped printing areas.

Monotypes

The exhibition presented several monotypes, mostly made in watercolours. They were quite faint, but had a very delicate quality to them, with fine lines probably added later on top of the actual print.

One of the monotypes I liked best was “Still life with pitcher and fruits” (c. 1899) which resembles the watercolour still lives by Paul Cezanne. But Gauguin’s style was different, with clear lines and simplified shapes. This one was made in gouache which resulted in somewhat intenser colours. It’s not very large, about 20 x 30 cm.

What struck me over the series of monotypes was how the style of Gauguin’s preparatory drawings resembled my own drawings for the stencil monotype series. In my own drawings, I had deliberately tried to simplify in order to obtain shapes that I could cut out in paper. Discovering a similar kind of simplification in Gauguins drawings and paintings made me think that maybe this was influenced by his printmaking.

Later reading of the Wikipedia article on Paul Gauguin informed me that this simplifying style in painting was termed ‘Cloisonnism’ by art critic Édouard Dujardin to characterize paintings “with flat areas of color and bold outlines” resembling the cloisonnée enameling technique. In this painting style, classical perspective rules are not followed, and this is something that I find very typical for Gauguins paintings – they all have a strange kind of perspective in them. Gauguins style is said to have evolved towards Synthetism, where “neither form nor colour predominate but each has an equal role”.

Oil transfer drawings

The exhibition info explained that Gauguin made his oil transfer drawings by covering a sheet of paper with oil paint, then placing a second sheet on top, and then drawing onto the clean second sheet with pencils. Afterwards, he pulled the two sheets apart and the actual artwork was on the back side of the drawing, transferred from the first sheet.

I really liked the combination of lines and shades of paint in these backdrawings. Unlike my own attempts, where the line work was more or less obfuscated by areas of ink unvoluntarily transferred, those of Gauguin were better controlled, with areas of colour supporting the linework.

Three of these drawings I found very remarkable. The first was part of a book cover for “Catholicism and the modern mind”, where Gauguin discussed and critiqued catholic moral beliefs. The two outward sides of the book cover were oil transfer drawings made in 1902. I made a sketch of the title page to study the distribution of light and dark more closely. The drawings were made on brown paper and I found it fascinating how the figures came up lighter off the background, and how Gauguin played with shaded areas to make elements come to the fore or recede.

By chance my sketchbook had brown paper and I was using a new pencil, “Prismacolor Ebony Jet Black”. My pencil drawings often lack depth because I’m having difficulties to create really dark values, but with these pencils it worked. They are very soft and with some overworking, quite dark tones resulted. I’m quite happy with my sketch because it captures what had fascinated me about the original drawing.

The second oil transfer drawing that impressed me was “Change of residence” (ca. 1902). It shows 2 figures to the left, a white horse in the middle, and another figure to the right. Again I was fascinated by the distribution of light and dark and how the areas in colour supported the linework. The figures had dark skin and were set off the dark background through lines only. They had light clothes on. Then there was the white horse which stood off from the dark background, but had its legs and feet darkened against a lighter background. The composition was a very intricate pattern of figure/ground, using line and light/dark values.

Two back drawings with the same title exist, but I’m referring to the one where the figures have dark skin, and which is less clear overall.

A third one titled “Tahitian woman with evil spirit” depicted the face of a young woman and an elderly male figure who represented the evil spirit. It was made in the same technique, but the overall impression was much subtler than the other two. I think this was the result of a different technique, maybe finer drawing tools and more controlled application of pressure on the paper.

With my own back drawing attempts, I had initially used a chinese bamboo pen without ink because I thought that applying pressure was the important thing and I did not want to “spoil” the verso of the paper sheet. But of course this did not work very well because I had no visual clue what I was drawing, besides very light impression marks. So I quickly switched to ball pen, which worked well for me because of the fine tip and exact linear pression (the results were diffuse but that’s another matter, probably too much ink on the plate).

In the museum, they presented the oil transfer drawings in free standing frames, so that people were able to look at both sides of the work. It was really interesting to compare the marks that were drawn with the transferred result. In one of the transfer drawings, Gauguin had made a light oil wash on the drawing side, and I thought this might have been to apply light but controlled pressure over a broader area – not to create a line, but to create shades.

Conclusion

I had been postponing the visit to this exhibition for weeks and really struggled to reserve the time for going. I’m so glad I finally made it, two days before the end of the exhibition. The visit was hugely inspiring and again I realized the difference between seeing real artwork versus seeing online or book reproductions. There are qualities in the real thing that cannot be transmitted by a technical reproduction: The true size, the quality of the paper, how the ink is layered on the surface. I loved looking at three-dimensional woodblocks and reliefs and getting a feel for their haptic qualities. It was exceptional and absolutely worth the trip.

Gauguins style resonated with me, maybe less the paintings, but the prints all the more, in particular how he simplified and clarified the shapes and how he used line, tone and contrast to support the compositions. I got so many ideas I’d like to try out in my own printmaking and am quite sure this visit will have quite an impact on future work.

I also like how I approached this research point. Focusing on a single artist and combining the research with an exhibition visit permitted me to dig a bit deeper. It was very rewarding and a welcome change to the often overwhelming experience of looking at many different artists in a brief period of time when researching a specified topic.

References

Exhibition site at MOMA http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/gauguin/home
Exhibition checklist with all works http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2014/gauguin/content/Gauguin%20Exhibition%20Checklist%2003.11.14.pdf
Paul Gauguin biography http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gauguin
Catholicism and the modern mind book cover (ca 1902) http://www.slam.org/emuseum/code/emuseum.asp?style=single&newvalues=1&rawsearch=id/,/is/,/18302/,/false/,/true
Gauguin Metamorphoses, Exhibition catalog

I then experimented with a third colour, violet. I made a backdrawing onto the ghost print of the very first blue backdrawing. The ghost print is in monochrome violet.

Then I made a multi-colour layered print: First a yellow backdrawing, then a violet backdrawing, and then a blue layer to colour the penguins and tint the background up to the edges of the plate. The series concluded with another ghost print, made from overprinting the yellow ghost with the violet ghost.

I then made some backdrawings from life. I chose a dried tulip in a pot, which I had kept because of its very bizarre but interesting shapes. I made the backdrawing and a ghost print.

Next I made a backdrawing of my cat Gina while she was sleeping on a stool. Without re-inking, I made another backdrawing of dried roses in a vase, and then a ghost print from the plate. The roses are very difficult to read. I think all the backdrawings from life look very interesting, but would need some reworking.

Reflections on the process

I had some trouble with the Akua inks, because they were so transparent. In particular the blue tone, which was ultramarine pigment. I mixed it with transparent base to obtain a thicker ink, but the pigment was so thinly spread that hardly any blue transferred onto the paper. It was only after several adjustments by adding more and more liquid ink that finally at least a moderately intense tone was achieved. Similar difficulties appeared with the other colours. I tried to improve the intensity by adding the liquid pigment directly onto the plate, but this caused a very irregular inked plate. I realized that this must have been the “viscosity effect” – inks of different viscosity repel each other. I’ve seen a tutorial where this effect is used to create printmaking effects. I did not further explore the effect this time, but maybe will in the future.

The quality of the line resulting from backdrawing is very interesting. The resulting prints have a very special appeal. I also like how the ink transfers around the line. The effect is difficult to control and adds an element of chance to the print. Backprinting from life is also an interesting technique although I found it difficult to handle practically. Making a second backdrawing from an already used plate wasn’t so successful because it further blurred the effect of the soft lines, and the resulting drawing is very difficult to read.

I think I’d like to further experiment with the technique when reworking prints that need a linear element. I do have some in the Clematis series where the effect might greatly improve the overall result.

Next I tried some bought stencils from craft supplies. The first print had the darker black tones, but the ghost prints after the stencils were removed from the plate looked really interesting. An ongoing problem with using plastic stencils is that it is so difficult to adapt the pressure of the press so that the stencils won’t slide on the inked plate.

I mixed the intaglio ink with transparent base, hoping this would help getting textures on the plate by pressing objects onto it. I made a second try, but no avail. So I made another print using the items as tools. I made no ghost print, in anticipation that it would look dull anyway.

During a coffee break I reflected on what I’d done so far and realized that my textured objects did indeed leave marks on the plate – I only had to run them through the press! So I made another attempt, placing some stuff on the plate. And indeed, the first print was again uniteresting, but when I removed the items from the plate and took the ghost print, all the textures had transferred nicely.

Next I took up the suggestion of using more than one colour to ink the plate and decided to add violet and orange to my black. I had the idea of creating a landscape at sunset and used some corrugated cardboard to represent gates over hills and fields. The first print came across nicely, but the black did not transfer well. So I decided to make a layered print with a second layer in black. I used the first print to lay out my textured items, then pressed the black plate into it to obtain a textured black plate. Looking at this plate, I realized it would probably cover much of the colour and I was tempted to simply make another monochrome textured print to capture the interesting patterns. I also considered wiping away the upper part of the plate to preserve the orange, and print black only into the lower areas. But then I decided to stick to instructions and just overprint to see how the result would look. It is indeed quite dark and has a totally different character from what I originally intended, but it does look interesting.

After another coffee break, I decided to have another go at creating a landscape print from a textured plate. I found that the corrugated cardboard looked a bit like apartment houses, and I thought of the New York City skyline before a sunset sky. Using a similar technique, I made the first print from a plate inked in orange and violet, wiping off a little circle for the sun. I overprinted using yellow, which changed the character of all colours into warmer tones. Then I made a second textured plate using pieces of corrugated cardboard for the skyline and clingfilm for the lower parts. I wiped the ink off the area above the skyline to retain the warm colours of the sky. The result is quite close to what I had in mind.

The next prints were made using soapy water, which is the solvent for Akua Inks. I drizzled some drops onto the inked plate and then moved the plate so that the liquid would wander around. The effect was very unimpressive, nothing much happened on the plate. In the print, I think the effect is not much different from selectively wetting the paper – the wet areas take on the ink differently. The ghost print confirms that the areas in contact with the solvent had transferred more of the ink, leaving almost white traces in this second print.

Then finally I tried out making direct marks using Q-Tips and kitchen paper towel. I returned to the idea of the Manhattan skyline – the view as a semi-island when looked upon from the south. I inked the plate in two colours, orange-violet in the upper area and black in the lower area, then made my marks directly into the plate. The image is very stylized, but I do like the print and the paler ghost.

Some reflections on the process

I was determined to let this series of prints not let go out of control as the previous did, because I was afraid to spend too much time on single aspects of this project. I think I succeeded in keeping the series manageable, but at the same time I realized that I did’t get as far as in the other project. It felt like playing a bit with effects, but not digging deeper and not fully exploring the potential. I guess this conflict between working thoroughly and explorative versus the need to get on with the course will accompany me until the end of this course, if not until the end of my OCA studies! Maybe a workable solution is to spend more time on those ideas and techniques that have particular appeal to me personally. On the other hand, a seemingly uninspiring technique might need some the extra time to reveal its potential. So basically, I don’t know how to solve the conflict and will decide each time anew.

A very important learning point from this series was how I could transfer textures to my inking plate. I had played with chance textures in the previous series, those left by the plastic stencils on the inked pvc plates. This time, I discovered a working procedure how to create textures on the plate. I’m really glad that I can use a printing press for this! It was also interesting to learn that the first print only served to create the texture on the plate, while the main interest was with the second print from the textured plate.

It was also good that I began to take the freedom of wiping off ink where I thought it would disturb the result. It may sound strange, but I tend to follow instructions to the word and it’s an act of liberation to just follow my instinct and do things differently, when I think it’s good for the print.

For the ink, I switched to Akua Liquid Pigment, which is also watersoluble. I wanted to try these out because I had read that they have a practically unlimited open time and do not dry on the plate. This turned out to be true and made the entire printmaking process so much more relaxed, because it took off me the constant worry of being fast enough to print the plate before the ink was too dry. I used a variety of different paper types: Very smooth and bright white digital printing paper, rougher medium-weight Fabriano Accademia drawing paper,  Japanese rice and Sumi-E paper, brown Kraft paper (very smooth), and green, gray and red pastel paper (rough, medium weight).

At the beginning, I used the press for all prints, but later on, I also transferred the ink by simply rubbing the back of the paper with my hand, finger or a wooden spoon. This was because my plastic stencils tended to slide on the pvc inking plate when the pressure was too hight. Using the hand, I was better able to adapt the pressure, in particular with the thin Japanese papers.

I constantly had to adapt the pressure of the press to the different number of layers I used for printing: The first print was regularly done using an underplate for registration, the inking plate, the stencils, and the paper. Then I removed layers when making ghost prints or printing from the inked side of the stencils. The setup remained a bit chaotic throughout the series, but I think this is part of the learning process – gaining experience with working procedures and developing a routine that works well.

Initially, I chose three basic colours for this project: Diarylide yellow (a very warm yellow tone), red oxide, and Phtalo blue. I began the series with simply overprinting lighter layers with darker colours, but tended not to like the results. For example, layers of yellow and blue resulted in muddy green that looked like nothing. Maybe it was the orange yellow tone I chose, or maybe the layers were not transparent enough. I added black to improve contrast and also produced interesting monochrome prints. Then I discovered that a pre-mixed dark brown worked well with the red oxide, and this led to the idea of using additional pre-mixed colours to improve the overall colour impression of my prints.  So I used pre-mixed orange (yellow and red oxide), dark brown (red oxide and black), and green (phtalo blue and yellow) for further experiments.

I also tried out Titanium white but found it not opaque enough. It wasn’t able to cover existing layers of darker colours and only added a milky sheen, and it was too weak to print as first colour on coloured paper. I could have added more pigment but I decided to abandon white for this series.

Unexpectedly, I created texture effects with the plastic stencils on the pvc plate – when pulling the stencils off the plate, the remaining ink was full of strange marks, and I used these patterns in ghost prints to create textured shapes. I then tried to incorporate the contrast of plain versus textured shapes into further prints. I also made use of the linear elements that developed at the contours around the stencils and incorporate them as additional layer into the composition.

Overall, the project got a bit out of control and I got carried away by the process. I produced over 90 prints and think only very few of them are really finished. I would have liked to add more layers for most. I kept reflecting how I could bring out the shapes better, add interesting colours through layers, improve the overall colour effect by adding additional layers. But at a certain point I simply had to stop because I felt I could spend a month or more working full-time on these prints until I might have completed them all.

During the process, I felt overwhelmed by the sheer mass of prints I was producing, not wanting to waste any ink on the plate. Each plate produced the first print, a ghost print, the full plate print plus prints from the inked side of the stencils. Adding layers to existing prints wasn’t always working so I made new prints on white paper to retain the beautiful and interesting shapes and textures, rather than re-inking the plate, so the pile of prints grew and grew… Then I discovered how I could place the stencils on the existing print to print only on selected areas that would support the composition.

I was no longer able to see all my prints at the same time, which made it difficult to select the next ones for overprinting in a particular colour. Looking through all the prints, I realized that I was able to organize them into colour series with similar overall effect, for example monochrome, selected two colours, selected three colours, or prints on coloured paper. This helped with organizing the work process. For example, I decided that I wanted to print with pre-mixed orange and then went through my piles of prints to look which ones might benefit from a layer of orange. These I pinned onto my book shelf and from there selected one after the other for adding spots of orange.

I also developed a routine for cleaning up the stencils between printing sessions and for different colours. Akua inks are a bit different from other water-based inks in that they have to be dissolved with soapy water first, then can be washed off. Using water first will create a mess. I researched the web for product handling info and watched Youtube videos to find this out, and then learnt how to properly handle the cleanup. What works best for me is first wipe off any pigment using kitchen towels or a rag, before washing out the rest using soapy water.

All in all, this series was a huge and extremely valuable learning experience for me. I wrote several pages with observations in my notebook. I learnt so much and I feel there was still more to discover. But the pressure of getting on with the course made me feel uncomfortable spending so much time on a single project.  I also thought it might be more beneficial to proceed with the next suggested variations to see whether the techniques might work to later complete some of the unfinished prints.

Some more points I took home

Every ink brand seems to be different! It took my a while until I was able to produce successful print layers with the Akua inks. I began with pure liquid ink but the layers were not saturated enough. I experimented with tack thickener and then combined the liquid ink with transparent intaglio base medium which seemed to work well for my process.

Every paper is different! Most strikingly, the colours come across very differently, depending on the paper. For example, red oxide was a warm, dark red on rough paper, but became a milky dark rose tone on the smooth bright-white paper. Consequently, the mixing of colours on different tyes of paper produce strikingly different overall colour effects.

White is important! I realized that leaving some white paper unprinted helps to make the existing colours look much brighter. This may not always be wanted, but it does make a huge difference and should be taken into account when composing a print.

Selected prints from the series

Monochrome, with and without white paper left

Prints on coloured paper

Multi-colour, multi-layered prints on white paper

I also did quite a bit of web research on monotype and stencil making and then decided to buy an electronic cutter. I chose the Cameo Silhouette which I found reasonably priced and quite flexible in application. This thing is very cool. It is directed at arts & crafts people, typically used in scrapbooking or home embellishments, but I think it will be a great tool for printmaking as well. It can cut a variety of materials like paper, cardboard, vinyl and other plastic sheets, and I think it’s perfect for making stencils.

As a first project, I made a text stencil out of “Follow your heart” using large sized a serif font which I modified a bit to avoid closed-in areas in O, R and A. It was a bit tricky to find out the right cut settings but after all, it worked out nicely and I have now one negative mask of the text and an positive plate made of the letters which I glued on thick cardboard (the backing of the watercolour pad, actually).

The second project was making a stencil of the penguins. I used digital photos of two of the prints to generate an exact mask with Photoshop. That image was imported into the Silhouette software and I used the trace function to make a contour sketch. The stencil was cut out from an old plastic sheet from my pile of legacy office supplies. The stencil is a bit smaller than the original hand-made paper one, because I wanted it to fit onto the 8 x 11 inch (ca. 20 x 28 cm) plastic sheet. I was quite happy with the result, because it provided me with a self-designed, reusable stencil with which to experiment.

Actually the handmade paper stencil was difficult to handle because it didn’t keep exact proportions and grew larger when dampened from the ink. So it was nearly impossible to make exact registration in the two-coloured prints. I thought the plastic stencil would address this because it wouldn’t change when damp from ink, and the positive and negative shape fit exactly. On the other hand, I felt it was part of the charm of the prints that they were slightly misaligned, as this added an element of surprise and individuality to each print. That might be lost when the stencil was exact.

In the end I learned that the plastic stencil had its own problems, for example that it stuck to the ink and was easily squeezed together from the pressure of the printing press. But overall, I was quite satisfied with the new tool.

Making multi-coloured prints from the new mask

For the first series of experiments, I chose watersoluble Speedball inks in process yellow, red (magenta) and blue (cyan) to try out how they would come out when overprinted. I began with yellow and the negative mask and made two series: One in correct alignment to test the new stencil, and the second following instructions to try out deliberately different positions of the mask. Each series consisted of the first print, a ghost print, a full plate print (stencil peeled off), and a print from the stencil alone.

I proceeded to red, then blue and made notes on every print, but I got taken away by the process and would have a hard time to exactly document how each one was made, even with only three colours used. The final prints have only two colours because I felt they were nice and clean as they were, and adding the third colour would have destroyed interesting textures.

Technical aspects

I chose 160 gms Fabriano acid-free drawing paper for this series. It buckled less than the 80 gms paper of the previous series and the quality is definitely better, but I think it is still too lightweight to be used damp. I tried pressing the paper overnight under a pile of heavy books, but the buckles remained. I will make another try and dampen the sheets slightly before pressing them, hoping this will help. So after this series, I’m still not satisfied with how the paper turned out.

Reflections on the process

To help me registering the print, I had made a registration sheet with lines for placing the inked plate with the stencil, and a paper frame to cover the outside edges where the plate was larger than the stencil. But during the process, I was no longer able to tell which print was correctly aligned and which one was misaligned and so placing the paper became experimental, as were the results.

It was really fun doing these prints, each came out as a surprise how the colours would transfer onto the already printed image. I was amazed how different the resulting prints were, all the variation achieved with only three colours and playing with alignment of stencils.

I also became frustrated cutting out stencils, because it takes quite a bit of time until a complex form like the penguins is cut out, and then they can be used only once or twice. I experimented with heavy smooth drawing paper which made the stencil more durable but was also more difficult to cut out.

Blue and green series

I started the series with dark blue as first colour and light blue as second colour, which I mixed by adding some white. But in the ghost print, these two colours were indistinguishable, so I mixed in some yellow into the second colour and continued with blue and green as my two colours.

The full plate print from the blue background series looked very dull, so I overpainted the plate and took another impression. But I find the result unconvincing. The brushstrokes of the background do not go well with the pale blue of the penguins. By contrast, the full plate print from the green background series looked much better and it was simply taking from the unaltered inking plate.

Yellow and orange series

For this series, I chose inexpensive standard white paper, A3 format, ca. 80gms. I started with the negative mask on a yellow inked plate, and dry paper. The ink did not transfer well, so I decided to dampen the paper for the next prints. This improved the ink transfer, but resulted in buckled paper.

I also made ghost prints and full plate prints, but I don’t remember the exact work sequences for these prints. Some colour mixing happened because I did not clean the masks before reusing them, and the pigments mixed into the fresh ink on the plate.

Reflections on the process

My mask was a bit too complex and I had difficulties with the alignment. I wasn’t able to register mask and paper by following the course instructions, and therefore chose a different method: I used a sheet of paper in the size of my printing paper, and drew placement lines for the inked plate on it. Then I aligned the printing paper with the registration paper. This wasn’t really accurate, but worked moderately well for the purpose.