Dry point is the most direct form of intaglio. The artist simply takes a sharp point and uses it to scratch into the metal plate to create the image. There is quite a variety of tools that can be used for this. Here's a video of Wayne Thiebaud doing that at Crown Point Press. As you watch it pay attention to the different ways he marks the plate, from gentle to rough and in-between. He even seems to be scratching into it with a pocket knife at one point. Here's Thiebaud's print. Notice the sketchy look it has. Crown Point Press - Wayne Thiebaud - Diagonal Ridge - Drypoint Here's another print from another artist named Ingrid Ellison. Again, note the sketchy lines. Ingrid Ellision - 6"x6" copper plate etching As a preliminary assignment we will modify one of your plates from an old print with the drypoint tools. A plate being worked with a drypoint tool: Green Door Printmaking .co .uk - Drypoint on Copper Some of those lines look almost sharp. And they kind of are. The reason they catch the light like that is that as the drypoint tool is worked against the plate it creates a burr. This is just like plowing a furrow into a field. You get a groove with a tiny metal edge, a burr, sticking up along each side. When you ink the plate the ink will go into the groove but it will also go under those metal edges that follow the groove. This makes drypoint different from any other intaglio method. It looks a little different but it's also very fragile. Rough treatment will bend the bur around or even knock it off. So, you've got to be gentle when you ink and print it. For this assignment you will end up with three separate sets of prints. - An edition of three pulled from the old plate you modified. - A suite of state prints pulled as you develop the image. - An edition of five consistent prints. Before class: - Watch some intaglio/etching videos. Read. Take notes. Write down questions to ask in class. - Develop an image to print. - Have in your sketchbook: - A description of this process in your own words. - A copy of the process steps. In class: - Your matrix for this assignment will be a copper plate. - Develop your image by adding and removing with the drypoint tools. Create lines and texture using the scribe, the scraper, and / or the burnisher. Be very careful not to push the tools toward your hands. As you work you will find it necessary to use different techniques to achieve different effects. You will work the plate, print, work the plate, print, work the plate again, print again, and so on until you achieve the desired final image. Each print represents a state. Such a set of non-consistent prints is called a suite rather than an edition. Once you have the image in plate the way you want it create an edition of five consistent prints with one inch margins. For these prints, you will use only black ink. Don't underestimate how hard it will be to make a consistent edition of prints. It is hard. Inking and printing dry points has everything to do with developing an intuitive understanding which requires printing a small mountain of them. PRINTING STEPS: Remember to bevel the edges of your plate before you begin working it. Remember to degrease your plate with the whiting each time you apply a ground or etch it. If you think your plate is clean you probably need to degrease it two more times. SET UP: - Tear several sheets of newsprint and your good paper to the correct size. - Tear a couple large sheets of newsprint for protecting the press bed and blankets - Create your registration template on a sheet of newsprint. - Set up the press by loading it with your, registration template, protective newsprint, template, zinc plate, and blankets. - You should have three blankets, one thick felt blanket between two thinner wool blankets. Make sure the blankets are not hanging over the ends or sides of the press and that they will not get into the gears. - Test run everything through the press and adjust the pressure. - Make sure there are clean enough blotters laid out to dry your paper through your whole run. If the blotters are dirty they can transfer unwanted information onto your print. DO NOT GET INK ON THE BLOTTERS. - Put out enough ink to make your edition. It won't take much. Work the ink for about a minute to loosen it up. - Soak your paper in the large soaking sink in the center of the shop. - Initial your paper on the back so there will be no confusion about which paper is whose. - The water needs to be warm, not hot, not cold. - The paper needs to soak for about a minute. It won’t hurt to soak longer as you will be removing the excess water with blotters. PRINTING: - Apply a small amount of ink to your plate and work it in every direction with an inking card (A.K.A. a hunk of cardboard). Make sure it gets into all of your lines and textures but be careful not to damage the burr. - Scrape off as much of the extra ink as you can with your card and save it for reuse. - Use a phone book page to remove as excess ink until you can make out your image somewhat. - Use a tarlatan to continue wiping the plate. - When you think the tarlatan has done it's job make the last few wipes with the fat of your hand. At this point you're only grazing the surface of the plate to remove the ink from areas where you don't want it. Remember, you want to leave the ink in the burr. Just graze the plate, don't rub. Hand wiping to be the best way to finish wiping the plate because you can literally develop a feel for how the plate should be inked. - Your partner should take your paper from the sink and blot out the excess water with the blotters, register it and print it. CLEAN UP: - Take the blankets out of the press and leave them folded on top or hanging in the rack. - Recenter the press. - Clean up any ink you have left with vegetable oil and Simple Green. - Make sure you drained the soaking sink and didn't leave any paper in it. - Put any damp blotters in the drying rack. On critique day, you will have ten minutes to get ready before we begin. - Make sure you have identified your prints in pencil. Make your best print number one and the last one the print you are least satisfied with. - Hang number one from your edition of prints vertically centered at about sixty inches above the floor. Use a loop of tape on the back; do not put tape on the front of your print. This assignment will be scored based on three criteria. These criteria will be weighted and assessed as follows: 1. Concept: 5 Points. Interpretation and application of your own ideas to the assignment using expressive, emotive, and aesthetic elements. Ask yourself “What am I trying to say with this image?” “How can I visually convey my idea?” 2. Participation: 5 Points. Attendance, involvement with your group, putting in time in the shop, proper shop etiquette, participation in discussions and critiques. 3. Process: 10 Points. Display an understanding of the process, making an edition of consistent prints, registration, and general neatness of the work. - The complete assignment is an edition of prints and an artist's statement. Incomplete assignments will continue to loose points for lateness until everything is turned in. Additionally, the following will cost you a letter grade: - Fingerprints or smudges on your prints. - Failure to properly identify your prints. - Failure to turn in an artist's statement with your prints. - Prints hung after critique begins will be considered one day late.
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Dry Point Etching
Drypoint Art Nature Etchings | Drypoint Art Etching Is a Unique Process in Printmaking | Here is a video on my drypoint etching process
Diesen Blogpost habe ich vor längerer Zeit für meinen alten Blogger-Blog geschrieben. Ich habe mich damals bei der Adventspost vom Post Kunst Werk Blog von Mi
Drypoint Art Nature Etchings | Drypoint Art Etching Is a Unique Process in Printmaking | Here is a video on my drypoint etching process
Diesen Blogpost habe ich vor längerer Zeit für meinen alten Blogger-Blog geschrieben. Ich habe mich damals bei der Adventspost vom Post Kunst Werk Blog von Mi
Today, I was inspired by the trees that are loosing all their leaves. I did a small 4″ square sketch and reduced it a little so it would fit on my plexiglass plate. I reversed my image with the “window light box”. Then scratched in the lines. This image was a good choice for this method […]
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etching, 18x19"
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25 September 2017 Research Point: Investigating Combination Printmaking and Incorporating Chine Colle Collages Find some examples of good use of chine colle in printmaking and share them with other…
How to make a Tetra Pak Print During lock down I was looking for more environmentally friendly ways to make print. I was already using Auka intaglio soy based ink and using the smallest amount of i…
Diesen Blogpost habe ich vor längerer Zeit für meinen alten Blogger-Blog geschrieben. Ich habe mich damals bei der Adventspost vom Post Kunst Werk Blog von Mi
How does an audience that is fully immersed in the digital age look at images? Interestingly, the direction we read (e.g. Westerners read from the left side of a line of text to the right side) has a big impact upon the way we look at images and, in turn, how artists arrange the lighting on their portrayed subject. For instance, artists wishing to cater for a left-to-right reading direction of a Western audience portray their subjects with a top-left lighting angle as the Western eye is attuned to perceive a subject’s form when it is lit from this direction. In Jean-Jacques de Boissieu’s (1736 –1810) Saint Jerome shown below, for example, Western eyes see the body of the saint as far more three-dimensional when he is lit from the left than if his body were lit from the right as shown further below when the print is “flipped” horizontally. For academic artists the arrangement of light is more exacting: a top-front-left angle convention as can be seen in John Samuel Agar’s (1773–1858) stipple engraving of antique heads (also shown below). Jean-Jacques de Boisseau (1736–1810) St Jerome, 1797 Etching, drypoint, engraving and roulette, chine colle. 49 x 35 (plate); 42.7 x 31 cm (image); 63 x 45.7 cm (sheet) Perez: 104 Condition: Rich impression with toning (oxidation) in the margins. There are also handling marks and many tears in the margins, some of which are restored. Jean-Jacques de Boissieu, (detail) St Jerome, 1797 (left) Boisseau, St. Jerome, 1797 (right) horizontally flipped image of St. Jerome (click the image to enlarge) John Samuel Agar (1773–1858) Plate VII, 1809 Stipple engraving in sepia on laid paper 27.8 x 22.5 cm (plate); 55.7 x 38 cm (sheet) Published by T Payne and J White (presumably as part of the folio, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture… published by T Bensley) Condition: crisp impression with thee light surface marks (dirt?) towards the middle-left side within the plate mark. There is a repaired 7 cm margin tear that is 1.5 cm away from the plate mark. The paper is clean and in good condition. John Samuel Agar, (detail) Plate V1I, 1809 John Samuel Agar (1773–1858) Plate XLII, 1809 Stipple engraving in sepia on laid paper 27.6 x 22.5 cm (plate); 55 x 38 cm (sheet) Published by T Payne and J White (presumably as part of the folio, Specimens of Ancient Sculpture… published by T Bensley) Condition: crisp impression minor wrinkling. The paper is clean with minor handling marks and 1 cm edge cracks on the lower and right edges. I am selling this print (Plate XLII) and the other Agar stipple engraving further above (Plate VII) for a total cost of [deleted] including postage and handling to anywhere in the world. (Note: these are large prints and will be shipped in a tube.) Please contact me using the email link at the top of the page if you have any queries or click the “Buy Now” button below. These prints have been sold John Samuel Agar, (detail) Plate XLII, 1809 This lighting arrangement has become so much a part of the Occidental way of looking at images that even digital buttons in computer programs (i.e. “pop-up” display keys shown on the monitor rather than physical buttons we can touch) have a top-front-left lighting arrangement enabling the viewer to see if a displayed button is raised or lowered. By contrast, artists wishing to cater for a right-to-left reading direction of an Arabic or Jewish audience will light their portrayed subject in the reverse direction so that light is cast on a subject from the top-front-right. The importance of this seemingly simple principle became apparent to me after contemplating advertisements in an Israeli newspaper and intuitively knowing that the compositions were aesthetically awkward (i.e. “wrong”) for my Western eyes. My awakening to the importance of the angle of lighting in these newspaper advertisements impacted also on my understanding of images in general that I knew deep down were unsettling. One of these is another of de Boisseau’s rich and moody prints, The Fathers of the Desert (shown below). I had originally acquired this print as I had (and still have) a fascination with hermits and this particular image is truly haunting. For me, a lot of its attraction rests with the standing figure’s facial expression of transcendent rapture (see the same facial expression in Zurbaran’s painting, St Francis, upon which this figure is modelled). There is also the hint of the unknown conjured by the landscape setting outside the dark void of the open cave. But to my eyes the really riveting attraction is the dramatic lighting (termed chiaroscuro) that is cast on the figure like a spotlight from the right. I suspect that if the lighting had been from the left, the figures and landscape features may have appeared more three-dimensional as is the case with St Jerome, but the peculiarly otherworldly mood of the image would not have been the same. Jean-Jacques de Boisseau (1736–1810) The Fathers of the Desert, 1797 Etching, chine colle. 49 x 35 cm (sheet) Perez: 103 Condition: cut within the plate marks but with a border around the chine colle of the image. There are handling marks and tears in the support sheet otherwise good condition. I am selling this print for $180 AUD including postage and handling to anywhere in the world. (Note: this is a large print and will be shipped in a tube.) Please contact me using the email link at the top of the page if you have any queries or click the “Buy Now” button below. This print is no longer available Jean-Jacques de Boisseau, (detail) The Fathers of the Desert, 1797 Of perhaps surprising importance to the following discussion is how artists arranged the lighting for early Oriental eyes where text is read vertically. The convention for Eastern artists was not to impose a sideways lighting on their subject at all but rather to portray spatial depth in terms of disposing each featured subject in its own spatial zone from foreground to distance. Often these zones are differentiated from each other with white space (or to use the term I have applied to Western art, noetic space; see post Jacque: Sheep and Shadows) and the suggestion of mist separating each zone but, or course, each subject demands its own requirements for spatial placement. How this Oriental approach of vertical reading has relevance to the digital age is again by being linked to reading habits. In the past, the direction of reading also applied to how books and other collections of text were negotiated in terms of turning the pages. First, the reader would view the top page (in the West this is signified by the bound edge of the book being on the left whereas in the East it is on the right) and then would turn the page over following the culture’s reading direction to see the next page or, alternatively, move the eye to the adjacent page. In short, there is a convention of where the next page is to be found. In the digital world things are beginning to change. For screen-based text the “top” of the page is to be found with the document scrolled upward and the pages that follow are to be found by scrolling the document downward. At first such an arrangement is sensible and unproblematic. But there is a subtle shift in the way the digital audience is now beginning to view images and it is different to the ways of the past. This subtle shift in reading only occurred to me after hearing about the conundrum encountered by advertisers concerned with making money from the social networking site, Facebook. The concern is that the viewers tend to not look at information placed on the sides of the screen as they have become conditioned to see this area as being for advertisements (as is the case with many blog sites). To express this differently, unlike readers holding a book or newspaper where the viewing field is the whole page, for viewers looking at Internet pages (as opposed to digitalised pages on eReaders like Kindle) the viewing field has arguably become more localised to the centre of the screen. In essence, the culture of digital reading is morphing our gaze to a vertical stream of reading from zenith to nadir. The interesting question that this poses is whether this focus impacts on the way digital artists compose their images and there is evidence that this may be the case. I posed this question to a former Honours student, Gareth Wild, for insights into his artistic practice and the following response highlights a change in attitude to the conventions of composition for at least one of the rising digital stars. Regarding Gareth’s first digital image, Zoombified Pirate (shown below), Gareth advises me that the image is top lit but he does not believe that the lighting is “an integral component to the overall impact of the image.” Although Gareth’s view of his image may be interpreted as negating the importance of the vertical lighting arrangement his following comment is very revealing: “The composition is vertically linear—not unlike the design of a webpage, and the ominous background smog creates a subtle vignette effect—again reinforcing the centralised composition reflected in our reading of a webpage. In Gareth’s digitally created image, Large Crustacean (shown further below) his insight is that this print is “less vertically linear than the former image, but again is top/back lit.” Going further, he points out that the “important information is central and a subtle vignette effect is also apparent.” Gareth Wild, Zoombified Pirate, 2011, digital image Gareth Wild, Large Crustacean, 2011, digital image From a personal standpoint there seem to be three ways that digital artists have morphed conventional principles of image making. The first is that the notion of a light source illuminating the portrayed subject from the top-front-left is changing to a system of immersive lighting where the effects of light are not so much “on” the surface of the subject but is within the portrayed subject. An example of this phenomenon is a painting by one of my first-year students, Sue Foster, who began her painting of a still life (shown below) as a watercolour and then “worked” on it digitally to refine the principles addressed in the class. Beyond the scattering of light, note also how Sue’s compositional arrangement echoes Gareth’s reflections on his approach discussed above. Sue Foster, Watercolour—Fruit, 2012 digitally manipulated watercolour The second way is to do with colour. In analogue paintings (i.e. paintings made using traditional materials) artists have the resources to make subtle adjustments to colour by applying a layering of glazes to produce an amalgam of tone, chroma, opacity, sheen and surface facture that—arguably—cannot be duplicated with screen colours (RGB) or with the colours of the print industry (Pentone spot colours and CMYK). This in itself is not a problem as a very close approximation of colour can be achieved but this screen colour approximation may lead to a fresh way of seeing imagery. By this I mean that there is a conceptual leap from Arthur C Danto’s notion of an audience’s engagement with the imagery of Giotto, Leonardo and Raphael “like a disembodied eye” (1990, p. 186) to the potential of viewer’s interactive and immersive presence in digital imagery. The third way is best described as the male vision of the hunter and gatherer where focus is literally targeted on the central area of the image. This pattern of where a viewer’s gaze rests returns us to the conundrum faced by the Facebook advertisers: digital viewers are not looking at the periphery of their field of view. _____________________ Danto, Arthur C 1990, Encounters and Reflections. Toronto, Harper & Collins
Drypoint Art Nature Etchings | Drypoint Art Etching Is a Unique Process in Printmaking | Here is a video on my drypoint etching process
Where inspiration stems from for the collagraph print pots made by Su France, the lincolnshire based, botanical artist, of Su France designs
We made Styrofoam printing plates of our faces by tracing photographs of ourselves in profile and/or “three quarter” view. We printed double images of our faces in black and/or white ink on a varie…
This post covers the basic chine collee technique of adding coloured paper to your prints. I will explain how to select and prepare paper, make glue, and
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