Printing an onion

Last night I went into TW to a printing workshop. I love looking at prints and wanted to  know how they are made - I've only done monoprinting before (apart from the time I sliced my hand open as a child trying to linoprint).

We started with colograph printing - inking objects like leaves, feathers, cuts-outs from textured wallpaper, placing them on a sheet of paper, and then passing them through a press so that the ink from the objects was transferred onto a clean sheet of paper. It's quite like monograph printing in a way. I used leaves, and cut out leaf shapes from wallpaper, orange netting and a plastic label.

I added green tissue paper, thinking of leaves landing on flowing water.

But I got muddled and half the tissue paper ended up stuck to the underside of the leaves.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We spent the second half of the evening trying dry point etching, which is what I was really interested in seeing done. I'm mesmerised by the detail some artists cram into an etching, and by the confidence of their lines, when one slip means a whole plate is ruined.

I brought along a photo of an onion I'd taken at home, and sat paralysed before my perspex plate. I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an artist, and drawing is not something I'm comfortable with at the best of times, even with a pencil and a rubber - so etching was intimidating.

 

Once you've finished etching, you put a small dab of ink on a large sheet of perspex, or two if you want to mix colours, and then scrape it thinly over your etching. Once it's all covered, wipe/dab it off with a pounce - a mushroom of hard scrim (rough cloth) and then another of soft scrim. Such splendid names!

On my first run through the press I used red ink, and realised my onion was flat and lacking in detail , so I added more screetches, re-inked in black, and ran the print through the machine again.

It still seemed rather two-dimensional so I added more lines and did a fresh print in black. It's still not a masterpiece, but I'm quite pleased at my first attempt!

 The thing I really came to understand is that printmaking is about layers - you see the object before you, and you recreate it on the plate, but the plate is a hidden stage in the process - it's a means to an end, and never gets seen by anyone other than the artist. And because the process of printing means passing what you've created through a mechanism of some kind (whether a simple roller or a complex press), the artist's hand is quite distant from the finished piece. I guess maybe it's the same for a writer - when you see the story in print, it's fixed, and has somehow moved away from the thing it was in your head and in your fingers as you wrote it down.

Our excellent tutors were Lindsay Connors http://www.lc-art.co.uk/ and Niki Campbell http://www.niki-campbell.co.uk/ both of whom made beautiful prints for the TW museum re-collections exhibition where writers and artists drew on the hidden collections in the basement http://www.re-collections.org.uk/index.html