Grey 1 Jan 06
I suddenly realised that I rarely do finished works (as such) because I'm always experimenting. Which is Ok. I suppose. Anyway, I've been experimenting again with wood block printing using birch plywood. All the following prints were done on Birch Plywood using Akua Intaglio carbon black ink. They were printed without a press using either a hard rubber roller or a spoon on the back of the paper. There were several things I wanted to investigate and here are a few conclusions.
1. Surface. The plywood chips easily so it is better used for large bold work rather ones with a lot of fiddly detail. Nevertheless I wanted to see how much detail I could get. I've tried with the untreated wood surface which is quite nice because you can see the grain in the print but the surfacee is soft. I tried treating the wood with a thin varnish called Deksol which is supposed to sink into the wood. I thought that might stop the surface chipping. It worked a bit but not enough to make it worth while. The best surface I found was painting with Primer/Undercoat. You can leave it rough in which case the brush marks come out in the print or you can smooth it with sandpaper to get an even finish.
2. Grey. I've tried lightening the Akua colours with white but the resulting ink is a rather unpleasant pasty sort of mess. So I've been looking at using transparent base to lighten the colours and it works quite well. For example you can take the transparent base and add just a tiny bit of intaglio black to get a nice grey. The other colours work quite well too. With 2 blocks you can get 3 tones - Black, grey and white. Also if you combine this with the rough painted surface to make brush marks you can get quite a rich surface on the prints. There are a couple of problems. The transparent base is slightly yellow and you can see this if you try to thin too much. Also I found that on some papers the transparent base seeps from the inked areas to the un-inked areas of paper and this appears as a band around all the inked areas.
3. Making Marks. I've found by accident that you can write onto the wood with a hard pencil or a ballpoint which has run out of ink and these marks come out in the print very clearly. I think this might be a good way to add texture.
Here are some results.
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