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.
24×18 Photo-Intaglio print of a manipulated photo that I took in winter of 2015 in Central Park.
I was trying to capture the twisted textures of the trees, contrasting the distant urban skyline, but the photo process filled in the trees as a flat black, and the emphasis is now on the dramatic sky contrasting the exciting weave of shadows on the walkway. As usual, printmaking doesn’t always do what I expect but I do like this image in the end.
I redid the plate, with an ochre/sienna ink, and layered it with a second plate, created from a different photo, after using the curves tool in photoshop to isolate the blacks. I also gave the 2nd plate a longer exposure to be sure the details in the black would print. This new image captures the sky and light areas of the photo with the first yellow plate, and the rich textures are captured on the black plate.
I plan to experiment further with this image in the spring of 2016
10″ x 8″ Mezzotint and drypoint from copper plate. The mezzotint rocker took days to create a velvety black, into which I burnished to lighten areas, and then use the diamond-tipped tool to scratch in the dark lines and control the darks. I like the way some patterns of the lines remain from the mezzotint rocking. It reminds me of a Hopper etching I saw once of a dark street corner, that had lots of cross-hatching, as the rocker creates.
Its so time consuming, that its no wonder the mezzotint process is regarded an elitist print technique. Beginning in the middle of seventeenth century, it was mastered by artists such as Durer and Escher.
12″ x 9″ drypoint in copper plate of Barcelona’s famous walk on “La Rambla” late at night.
Side entrance to our first house on Holmes Oval. 9’x12″ Linoleum Block print on paper. 2014
Intended to be the sister print to the Back Walkway to our next home.
9×12 Linoleum block print of the back entrance to our home. I carved this in the Fall of 2013, as my first work, diving back into my masters degree in printmaking.
17″ x 11″ Woodcut of a back street in Granada, the Albayzín neighborhood with streets over a thousand years old
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.
denise moser 