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.

Last Demo of the Semester: Litho

Brian and I finished up our print survey class with the hardest of the media: lithography. It was barbaric: students had to grain the stones themselves with the levigators and carburundum grit, a lengthy process which left a few so beat that they didn't have much left to put into the actual drawings on the stone. Brian was lead on the litho assignment, so I took over the secondary processes. During the printing process, I showed a quick and dirty chine colle using UHU gluestick (it's acid free). Because we required two of their final prints to be experimental in some way, I also showed them how to do an easy butcher paper stencil screenprint over the lithographs.

Sketchbook

I've been working on some very large prints for my upcoming thesis exhibition (opening May 22nd!) and so haven't been making so many impressive weekly prints. Nonetheless, I'm still working!

As part of the lithograph assignment we gave our class we asked for two experimental multi-media prints. I gave the class a quick butcher paper stencil screenprint demo (which took about 10 minutes total) to give them an option that was fast and easy for one of their multi media prints. I pulled the screenprints onto a lithograph first, and then while cleaning up pulled the last of the ink onto my sketchbook.

Screen Demo

The assignment for my 370 class was to do a three color screenprint with overlapping, transparent colors, making the stencil on the screen with screen daring fluid and screen fill. This demo print is not to the same standard that I've been trying to stick to for demo prints. I've been trying to make all of the demo prints at least a little exciting, but this one I did a little last minute.

Steve

This print is from another demo of monoserigraphy that I did for Kimiko Miyoshi's monoprint class. I tried to improve it this time, because I know some of the students in the class have seen me do this before: I revised the handout, made it more concise, added a part about registration at point of exposure, and added a few bits that I've figured out over the last few months.





I got mad sweaty while I was doing this, too. It's probably because of all the coffee I had at Minona while preparing the screens throughout the day, in and out of my studio.

Print Survey Class First Assignment Demo: Monotype

Friday, I did my first demo for the Print Survey class I'm assistant teaching. Luckily for me, last week I spent hours making monotypes in front of a crowd so I was prepared to do it for the 26 or so students in the class. Though the crowd at the LA Art Show was significantly more enthusiastic, I still think I did a pretty good job.

First print: flat of color, reductive monoprint using oil based inks with a stencil made from torn paper and talcum powder.


Using the ghost of ink from the first print, I made an additive monotype with oil based inks and chine colle for the shirt:


Roxanne Sexauer, the professor for the class, showed the students tracing and then printed the traced plate. Finally, I showed the class an additive monotype using hydrated watercolors (the kind which comes in a tube) and aquacrayons:

Using waterbased materials is useful if you can't spend a lot of time in the studio. Since you have to wait for the watercolor to dry before printing anyway, you can make the painting on the plate at home and then bring it to school to print it.

Then, we let the class go, and while I was cleaning up all the inks and rollers and such from doing the demos, I made this final print using the ghost from the previous plate. I think this one is the most successful of the day.