Snow Shadows on Walkway

 

My first attempt at a 4-color photo-intaglio, “Snow Shadows,” had technical problems with the black plate last year.  So I improvised and made it a 2-color plate with red and black(using the cyan plate for the black ink).  This year, I re-visited the image and exposed another black plate to reprinted the image again, now as a 4-color image.   The result is a richer print, with warm yellows in the reflected light, and cooler shadows in the foreground.

8 Snow shadows on Walkway

Passages

2015_06 Holmes Oval original tuche print with pastels
Holmes Oval – 18″x24″ photo-intaglio of Tushe wash with pastel

My graduate thesis focused on combining various printmaking mediums, by layering the prints, and incorporating digitally-manipulated photographs.  The image above, of Holmes Oval, began as a tucshe ink wash painting on mylar, that was exposed onto a photo-sensitive plate, to be inked and printed as the first layer. However, the photo process had washed out the light textures and so I added pastels to give it the depth it needed.

It was about this time that I had begun experimenting with collagraphs and I decided to create a collagraph of Holmes Oval and try printing the tusche wash intaglio on top of the collagraph.  The resulting print is below, which actually became quite ominous, with the netting in the sky and the woven threads of fabric moving across the street and lawns. The trees also take on a tangled web of threads and the houses are in the deep shadows of textured surfaces below.  This is a monoprint, due to the changing nature of the fabric surfaces and the inconsistent wiping of various colors in the collagraph layer.

The third image in this post is “Sixth Avenue” which began as a woodcut, on which I glued fabrics and netting again.  But this time, I took a photo of the first print of the collagraph, and then subtracted the textures from a photograph of Sixth Avenue.  The result is a relationship between the two images, which are now layered on top of each other.

2015_11 Holmes Oval 3-layers yelloworange_white add_2569
Holmes Oval South, 18″ x 24″ is 3 plates:  Collagraph, Tushe ink wash painting, & Photos
2015_10 Sixth Avenue orange-ochre roll with photo_white add_2571
Sixth Avenue, 18″x 24″ 2 plates:  collagraph and PhotoIntaglio

Sisters

2014_04 LizJulz Sisters in Red

11″x14″ 2-plate intaglio etching, from a plastic plate, using photo-sensitive emulsion to transfer the two painting/drawings of ink and tusche on vellum.

In other words, I painted and drew the marks onto frosted translucent vellum, with a carbon-ink solution.  The drawings were then exposed to photo-sensitive emulsion-covered plastic plate.  The plates were then developed in a soda ash bath, and then inked and printed on top of each other on paper.

Granada Boulevard, combining collagraph and intaglio printmaking techniques

intaglio
Granada Boulevard

This 20″ x 16″ print is a mixed-media layering of three printings from two plates.  The first matrix/plate was a collagraph on masonite(carving of buildings and covered with lace, acrylic gel, and gauze), first wiped with black ink and then rolled with off-white ink as a block print on top.  The third layer was from another plate, a photo intaglio plate with the details of the building windows, that is wiped with black ink and printed on top.

Snow shadows on back walkway

2014_12- Snow Shadows 12x18 two color photo intaglio plates

18″x14″ Two-plate photo intaglio from my photo of our back walkway after a heavy snowfall.  I was attracted to the graphic textures on the bushes and the rhythm of the shadows from the railings on the snow.  I didn’t print all the colors of the actual photo, leaving out the black plate, which had grounded the background trees, loosing that illusive background.