I recently had an incredibly useful session in the print room with my lecturer and the print technician, who both showed me a lot about lino printing. We used the University’s lovely but neglected Albion press, of which there are two in Europe, both situated in our University. I was immediately told not to use the water based ink I’d been leaning towards, but instead the oil based, which is a very different texture. Padding was another thing I knew nothing of but is very important in getting the correct density of ink in the image. There seems to be two main variables- the ink and pressure, so it should be pretty straightforward to work out what is lacking.
I haven’t posted for quite a while, but I have been busy. My current university project is an anniversary hardack edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species, with at least 14 chapter illustrations, some full page and some vignettes, so I’ve been quite busy reading the damn thing, researching and drawing for it. These are some of my initial drawings for the themes of the book. I wanted to make it quite new looking, but stll referencing the media of the time.
Silkscreening is a great way to get your designs onto paper, fabric, metal, wood- pretty much anything! The method doesn’t actually use silk- but it’s a fine mesh that’s stretched across a frame. It allows you to use more complex design that a a stencil and spray paint or paint because the mesh allows you to attach islands that would otherwise be lost. You can block off areas of the screen in various ways- using a light sensitive fluid to create a very detailed image, or using viscous fluid to block out some parts of the mesh. The very simplest version of silkscreening uses a stencil, and this is the method I’m going to explain here.
This particular method uses contact paper (or sticky-back plastic as it’s known to schoolchildren and librarians alike), but you can also use a sheet of acetate, paper, card or stencil film. I’m going to go with contact paper for this one because although it’s not really re-usable (many prints can be made with the one stencil, but once you clean up and peel it off it’s pretty much gone) it does happen to make pretty clean images.
Well, it’s been a few years coming, but I finally have a website. I’ve made umpteen sites of the past five years, but not uploaded a thing, so I’m quite proud of actually getting round to it. It’s pretty css intensive, which was fun, and shouldn’t be too slow to load.
Well, the first post ought to be fairly momentous, and happily on the 16th of October we had one of the most useful lessons in the three years of an Illustration degree. We were given a day workshop with Richard Roberts, a London-based printmaker, illustrator, and graphic designer. We were shown the ins, outs and [...]