As a consequence of my dissatisfaction with the printing paper in the previous series, I bought inexpensive acid-free medium weight paper (150-200 gms) and some lighter and heavier materials for experimentation.

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.