Untitled (In the woods)

As most of you won't be able to get along to Impressions 7, the Annual Impress Printmakers Exhibition, I thought I'd share my new print which is in the show.

This is probably one of the first, if not the first digital print which has felt satisfying to me.

I took the original photo several years ago using the camera facility on a Sony PSP, which has a  toy camera option.The iPhone was around at the time, but it was just before Instagram. 

About a month or so ago I began working on the photo. I noticed the circle of light on the left and wanted this to be the focus.

And this is  the final result.

Untitled (In the woods) by Amanda Watson-Will

Actually, the final result is a small edition (five) of pigment prints on BFK Rives Digital paper. When I get a chance I will take a photo of the print and post it, because that is why I am so pleased with this print. The blacks have printed beautifully, rich and dark, and there is no sense that anything has been lost by the fact that this is a digital print and not hand pulled.

If you are in Brisbane and able to come along to the show, it opens Friday night. Details in my previous post. Hope to see you there!

Making “The Great Library”, Part 2

The Inside Continued – Editioning

In last week’s post I had made it as far as a successful proof for the inside of my book object “The Great Library of Alexandria”. You would think that a successful proof would mean that things were sorted, but as soon as I tried to make an edition of the drypoint, I had problems.

As I’ve said before, I’m not experienced in intaglio printmaking, and with a drypoint especially, there is quite a bit of lee-way in how you wipe back the ink. In case you’re not clear, a drypoint works like this.

What is a drypoint exactly? 

* you take a plate (traditionally copper, but also used are zinc, perspex, other plastics and even illustration board coated with wood varnish, as I wrote here)

* and a pointed scribe of some sort (even a nail can be used at a pinch)

* and you draw, creating “a burr” or a raised edge on the plate. It is this which catches the ink for printing in addition to the line you have scribed.

Once your image is done, you cover the plate with ink and wipe it back with tarlatan (a coarsely woven fabric traditionally used by printmakers) using circular movements. Working this way forces the ink down into the line and  burr, while removing it from the surface.

When you print a drypoint, you achieve a very particular type of line. One that to me, is very beautiful. It is soft and fuzzy, yet rich and dark. And the burr is essential to that mark.

The Great Library of Alexandria (detail)

You can imagine that the burr is very fragile, even more so with perspex than say copper. So, as I tried to make my edition of about 12, I was wiping very carefully and also trying to replicate the original plate tone, which had contributed so much to the first proof.

After three or four attempts, none of which were usable, I began to realize that my plate might not last the edition. What to do? The plate was quite large, I didn’t want to start from scratch (no pun intended!).

Digital BFK Rives?

I knew that there is now a digital BFK Rives, produced by Canson. I wondered what the paper was really like, and whether it would be possible to reproduce a scan of the artists proof using it. I decided it was worth a try, and then I remembered that a while ago I bought a Canson inkjet paper sample pack. When I checked, there was a sample of the BFK Rives in the pack, so I downloaded the *free ICC profiles from Canson, pressed print and crossed my fingers.

I was actually stunned by the quality. I had expected to feel that it would be a major compromise to work this way, but in the end, it was such a practical solution for me. I love to work with my hands, and a mouse or even a graphics tablet can never be the same to me. Yet, so often I come up against my practical limitations, and am physically unable to create even a small edition like this without exhausting myself. It seems to me that making the original by hand and editioning it digitally is a good compromise.

*Using free ICC Profiles

Free ICC profiles can be downloaded from the websites of the paper manufacturers. If you’ve bought a fine art quality inkjet paper but found the colours hugely different from the colours on your monitor, using the ICC profile may help. I am planning to write a post about what profiles can and can’t do for you, and how to use them in the next month or so.

Making “The Great Library”, Part 1: Inside

From my first reading of the Art & Lies extract by Jeanette Winterson, I wanted to depict the boys in their eyries.

Initially, I planned to make a varied edition of altered books and I progressed as far as buying Condensed Readers Digest books in sufficient numbers, before I realized the difficulty of hand-carving hundreds of pages over and over to make the edition. Fortunately, another structure came to mind.

The Structure

At Ed Hutchins’ Single Sheet Structures workshop, a couple of years ago, I learned about the story box. It’s a simple structure that can be very effective when it supports the concept, and in this case it was perfect. With the image of the eyries in my head, I plunged into working on the inside of the box.

Inside

For this edition, I really wanted the warmth of a hand-pulled print, despite having more experience with digital printmaking. Having only made a couple of etchings before, I chose to do the inside image of the library as a drypoint on a Perspex (acrylic) plate, 30cm x 42cm. I did not want to make a large acid-etched plate in case it wasn’t successful.

Below you can see the plate now.

To inscribe it I used two drypoint tools, which you can see too.The one with the wooden shaft is an inexpensive diamond point from Dick Blick. The diamond makes an incredible difference in the pressure you have to apply. I’m not sure whether this particular tool will last very long, but if not I’ll certainly be replacing it with another diamond point. If anyone has a favourite tool for drypoint they recommend, please do let me know.

Digital Background

I found this lovely photo (above) of the book stacks at the British Library by Steve Cadman on flickr. It was the inspiration for the colours I initially prepared for the background of my print, using acrylic inks (below left).

Right: In progress, showing lightened areas in two places

I scanned the background and planned to create areas where the eyries would be positioned using the “lighting effects” in Photoshop. Obviously, this darkens those areas of the print that you haven’t chosen to be “lightened”.

In case you haven’t used this, you just go to:

Filter>Render>Lighting Effects.

There are a lot of options, but a good place to start is with either Omni or Spotlight (found in the Light Type window). From there you can play about with intensity and narrow or wide focus. It maybe useful to adjust the “exposure” and/or “ambience”, which can be found under Properties. I’ve found these to be the most fundamental controls to achieving simple but effective lighting effects. Beyond that, you can spend hours playing to see what can be done.

Combining the Digital and Drypoint Prints

In total I created five “lightened eyries”, which showed up quite nicely, but the background was now looking rather dark and dull. I altered the saturation and colour balance until the background printed on the Rives BFK printmaking paper to my taste. As this isn’t a paper for inkjet printing, there aren’t any colour profiles online, so I had to make numerous small test prints on the actual paper in order to see the colours.

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Left is the final background, as the file appears on-screen. Right, a scan of the artists’ proof (drypoint over digital background on Rives BFK).

More next time!