Collagraph

I know one day I am going to do some of this with fabric in mind.  I did this once before with Sarah Ross-Thompson but she has now moved up to Scotland, a glorious location on Lochgoilhead but terribly impractical to just pop up to for the odd class.  We are lucky in Dorset to have some wonderful collagraphists in the area though and one, Genevieve Lavers, is just spreading her wings in wanting to give classes and Jan and I were lucky enough to be her guinea pigs.    

Last week we spent the morning making the plates. The first using all sorts of items to see which of the textures would do what with the inks and the other two trying to come up with a coherent picture in mind.

Today we went back as they had now dried and been varnished.

First to be inked was the experimental plate.

I printed the one on the right first and the one on the left was the ghost print with a roll over of a contrast colour.  Quite pleased.  It is a good record of which materials do what.

I then did the tree root which I was over the moon with.

And then the cactus still life.

there was time to do acouple more of each but the first tree root is still my favorite.

It was an enjoyable couple of days.  I think Genevieve has some fun times ahead teaching this class.  I hope Jan and I were good, and useful, guinea pigs too.

On the home front Olivia was 6 months on Sunday and John was a few years more than 6 months old on Monday.  I think they enjoyed sharing their day.

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Collagraph Results

I've been having a little play this morning.  Please bare in mind that when I did this with Sarah she is a professional and so her press is huge and heavy, her inks oil based, all the equipment you would ever want to use for this was there and also, most importantly, her expert advice was just an elbow nudge away.  I have a little table top roller press about A2 size, I was using water based inks and I was on my own!!

The photos are the wrong way around because that was the way I hung them to dry.  The first one was far too pale.  I think there were two reasons behind this; I was very cautious about the amount of ink I put on (and you do have to rub an awful lot of it off again too) and I had the rollers too far apart to make a good impression.  After cleaning the plate and inking again I applied another twist to the rollers and the print was a little better but, if anything, the paper a little too wet.

Left 2nd print  Right 1st print

The third print, again after cleaning, re inking and another little tweak on the rollers came out really rather well and I was quite pleased with parts of this one so I went for a fourth.  Now this one I re inked again and thought I would try on fabric.  It didn't work at all well  I'm not too sure if the fabric should of perhaps been damp like the paper or I should have inked more to compensate.  Anyway I wasn't going to waste the ink that was there, and it is quite hard going on the wrists and fingers all that rubbing, so I put through my last sheet of pre soaked paper. It wasn't a great print as I think the fabric had taken the oomph out of the ink.  

Left 4th Print Right 3rd Print

Lots to think about at the very least.  John did moan a little because the collagraphy plate now looks nothing like it did yesterday and he quite liked how it was all button polished, but there you go!  This shell is my favorite part of all of them.

I now have some background papers to play with but the whole process is quite intense!

And if you would like to see how good you can become, with years and years of practise and all the right gear, Sarah's web page is http://rossthompsonprints.com/home and now she has moved to a most fabulous house on Lochgoilhead there will no doubt be some great new work coming along.


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