Collagraph: "Raven"

I just wrapped up a four day, four week, collagraph workshop at Josephine Press. You can see examples of some of my student's work on the JP blog, here. Collagraphs are pretty fun, especially for someone new to printmaking. The plates are made out of all manner of stuff, much of it just garbage, and all glued down to a simple, cheap substrate like chipboard. I tore the back off an old calendar for this one. After gluing all the pieces down to the substrate, the plate is sealed with a couple of layers of acrylic medium to protect it from the ink and solvents applied to it. I made two demo prints for the class. The first was a little house print, and the second was this raven collagraph. The plate is made with modeling past on a chipboard substrate. I cut the chipboard to the shape of the raven and then messed around with acrylic modeling paste to get the feathers and other features of the bird. Below are two prints, the the raven printed in conjunction with another plate, and then the ghost print of just the raven.

Monotype: "The Crowd, II"

This is the third of the monotypes I made for my recent solo show at GCAC, The Disagreement. I drew my sculptures for it, and tried to place them in a world that gave them a little illustrative mentions without removing them from the gallery context. Which is to say, I wanted the environment I put them in in the monotype to mimic the sterility of the gallery. Here's the sculpture, "They've Already Left," depicted in the print, with and without hordes of people:

Catman print from linoleum scraps

I've been doing my best to get Josephine Press tidied up this summer. The Press has been around, and in the same location, for nearly as long as I've been alive, so you can imagine that there are little bits of all sorts of things hidden away, some of them useful and some of them useless and long since expired. Like ink, for instance. I just found a drawer full of little pots of lovely custom colors some printer mixed up for a client years ago, all of them dried into solid lumps. But I also found a cache of linoleum scraps. They were destined to be thrown out, but I decided to try to use them to make some wee prints with. I can carve a little image in a sitting, and then print it when I have some downtown or after a workshop. This fellow I printed with the ink left over from the monoprint workshop last weekend, and used paper left over from old jobs (offprints and trial proofs, we have boxes of it) and some pretty blue hemp washi left over from a previous edition.

These are intended for postcards that I'll send to my friends who may already be tired of receiving postcards, but let me know if you're interested in doing a trade (print for print or something like that) because I'm up for it.

Techniques represented: linocut, and on the found paper: bokashi roll, screenprint, lithograph, photo etching, monoprint, and xerox solvency transfer.