Tradigital, 1

A couple months ago, I started working at Josephine Press in Santa Monica. It's a small press that publishes a few prints, does some workshops, etc. Josephine does a lot of "tradigital" work, prints that combine digital and traditional techniques. Mostly, theses are intaglio and relief prints over digital backgrounds. The digital part is often very colorful, which is taking some getting used to for me. John Greco, the master printer at Josephine, had me make two tradigital relief prints using photopolymer plates and digital backgrounds.

Photopolymer plates are also something I've never worked with much before. Light hits the plate and hardens the polymer there, so to work with it you make a negative of the image you eventually want to print, much like photography. I painted my negative on wetwork acetate using cel medium, but you can also just invert an image in Photoshop and print it out on a transparency if you don't like having to think backwards.

The relief printed image is from an artjam I did with my pal Trent Call, and the digital bit is a photograph I took of downtown LA. The paper is this special washi that's coated to be used in inkjet printers from Hiromi Paper.