Reading Week - Day 4

Today I got to do so much stuff concerning colour, and it's so annoying that none of it can be used here!!!!
But thats ok because I have learnt lots of new skills for printing with colour.

I have learnt that when trying to mix the ink used for Lino and Mono you really need to consider the colour and shade that you want. Start from the lightest colour and adding tiny parts of darker ones. Mixing the inks themselves takes a long time, and to mix them you have to use a specific technique. Instead of just getting a white and adding blue and mixing you have the put the inks on the table and use a spatular to scrape the colours into each other. It is hard to explain but the technicians in the print room are always around to help! I got too impatient with my colour mixing and rolled the colour out with the roller before it was consistent, meaning that some of my prints are slightly blotchy.

I also got the opportunity to screen print over many different colours of paper today to see how the ink transfers. I was using white paint, which i mixed at 50% with the binder, making it more opaque than normal but meaning I have to print fast so the screen doesn't dry out. Sarah said that white never goes over darker colours too well, but this made my prints quite interesting. The white was going over the paper colours and picking up tints of the colour, so when printing on black the white paint appeared a really light blue.

Towards the end of the day I started to layer different print processes onto of each other. Combining Lino with screen printing in many different layers, which was really successful. And I then tried to combine etching with both drypoint and mono, these failed quite amusingly! But this means that I can use the mono and drypoint backgrounds that I used for other images :)

Reading Week - Day 3

Today I made some screen prints in a four colour separation as I was making my Lino. A few weeks ago when in the print room I realised that making work is so much more efficient when you have something to do as a filler task, other wise too much time is wasted on waiting. I applied this work ethic to today, I knew that waiting for my screens to dry and waiting for the printing beds to be available would take a while, so I continued cutting the layers of the lino when waiting.

I decided to make a screen with four colour separation so that it would help me understand colour slightly better. I learnt much more than I originally thought I was going to!

First off when making a print with a four colour separation you need to mix the inks, but perfectly. I normally guess the levels of ink and binder when preparing my colours. With a four colour separation you can't do this, all four colours need to be of the same level so that they can perfectly sit over the top of one another. You need 50g of system 3 acrylic paint (in cyan, magenta, yellow and black) and 100g of binder. This should make up a whole pot of ink. I managed to make much less that this at first because the scales were set to pounds! But we worked it out and no ink was wasted :)

Above is a small section of one of my prints that went wrong because it wasn't aligned correctly. I am not going to use it for my print elective because of this but it is a really good example of how the ink lay over each other to make different colours. 

Reading Week - Day 2

Today I worked lots with Lino. I have made a Lino that is made out of 3 different pieces so that I can ink each piece of the plate up with separate colours. I can't show any of the images that I make from this print process but I can show the plate it self.

This is my lino in it's final stages of cut, the owl is nearly all cut away.

The problems that I had with this process were; cutting the lino itself, placing it all together for printing, and registration.

The Lino is really really thick and has a gauze backing beneath it. Cutting through the lino is fine but trying to get through the gauze was near impossible, my whole right arm went numb trying to cut it! Thankfully Neil came and helped me with the rest of the tricky bits!

I also had lots of problems when trying to place the three separate plates back together once they were inked up. You can't touch the surface because you were create imperfections in the ink, but plates don't fit back together as perfectly as they had come apart. I ended up having to shave small parts of the bird layer away so that it would fit easily into the middle. Even then I had to use a small spiked took to push the plates into place (as long as you put the took in a part of the lino that you have cut away it won't mark the print!)

Then Finally when I came to layer the images up I found even more problems. The nipping press that I used moves the sheets of paper! So even if you line it up it moves, so you have to be really really protective of the placement of the paper right up until it is under the press and ready to be pressed.

Reading Week- Day 1

I started my print room elective today, the elective itself runs from this Monday till Thursday 9 till 5 each day. Although I can't include any of the work I make over the the week in my Comm Tech project, I am still going to work on colour, and how I can include colour in my work.

So today we just quickly went over most of the print processes that are available. I have done all of these print processes before this induction but I learnt some really useful things.

In Etching

On the 19th of Oct I posted my A4 etching plate that I made. I had said that the reason that my plate didn't come out very even was because I didn't leave it to aquatint for long enough. I found out today that that isn't the reason. It could be one of three things;
- There could of been an oily residue left of the plate when spraying the clay acrylic onto it.
- I could of blotted the plate dry too vigorously between stages and actually removed the clay layer.
- Or when the spray was put on the plate initially it could of been sprayed on unevenly (I didn't spray it myself, and Neil in the print room reckons it might be this reason. So next time I know to do it myself!)

In Drypoint


Before when I have used drypoint it has really wound me up that you can't make perfect lines. Cutting through the plastic with a sharp object creates a really jagged and uneven line. I realised today that this can be a good thing, instead of trying really hard to make it perfect I made my lines really quickly so that they deliberately became uneven. This worked really well to create a tree background that I can then work into later!

I don't even want to put this horrific attempt on my blog!

I thought I would try and add some colour to my 'The Woman' picture. I did this but putting some thin paper over the top of my original outlined image (i'm too scared of ruining my first drawing). I thought I would scan in both the colour layer and the outline that way I can play about on photoshop with the colour more, and it means I have more than one go at not ruining my work!

This is the rough colourful mess I made with chalk pastels. I wanted to pick up lots of texture.

Here's the chalk layer with the outline over the top, I set the outlined layer to 'multiply' on photoshop so that all the white disappears, literally making it just an outline on top of my background. Doesn't make it look good though! This is horrific and I hate it! The chalk pastels on their own are too vibrant and there are too many bright colours in this now. I think it would be better if the whole image was murkier and darker.

Here is my next attempt. For this one I just made another layer in photoshop and put a murky green shade over the whole later, I set the opacity to about 30% so that you could still see some of the detail of the background. To the  background layer I used the colour burn tool to darken up some of the shades in the trees and in certain parts of the water and the woman. Doing this brought loads of textures out which I quite like. I also added a bit more line work over the trees, I'm not sure if this is actually needed though.

I decided what was annoying me about the top images is that they were just too busy. My line work is quite detailed so I don't think the background needs to be as detailed. In this image I made the green layers opacity up past 50%, I then just painted some rough shades over it. You can still see some of the texture from the background which I like. I also added small amounts of shading to the woman, I just wanted her to pop out of the image a bit more so I added some highlights.

This is my latest version of this image. For this one I made my original pastel background greyscale so that only the textures would be picked up, I decided that the colours that were coming through form it were still too varies and too bright. I did as I had done before and put a flat layer of green over the top. Then I started working into the background with the burn tool in shades of green and red. I really like the textures that are coming from this one. I made a whole new layer to colour the woman on this drawing because I thought she should stand out more from her background. I made her a yellowish green so show that she was dirty and not quite right. I added the highlights again and shades of red and brown to work along side the theme of horror and blood.

Honeslty I don't really like any of these pictures. I do like the combination of using found materials and textures and taking them into photoshop to make them do what you want them to though.

The Woman

I read this competition brief the other day and started making some artwork for it.

Can you design a unique new illustration or poster for Lucky McKee’s THE WOMAN?

If you think you have what it takes to produce a work of art that will speak to Horror and Cult audiences, then this competition is for you. Your entry must embody some characteristic from the film or book by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee.

I wasn't going to include this in my comm tech at first, but I think the image I have made would be a good image to experiment with some colour!

This is my original line drawing

The colour ideas that I had for this image were quite murky, maybe combinations of greens and reds. As it is an illustration aimed at people that love horror it should be quite a dark and gloomy image.

Colour Theory 2

Additive - light.  Subtractive - print