New Relief Print and Silk Screening Explorations

It rained most of today, thankfully not when I was walking to and from bus stops. On my morning trek down Main Street at 7 am I had to stop and unpack my camera to capture this moment. What a beautiful way to start your day. This makes 7am not so bad!

I started plotting out my next woodcut print today in the print lab at SIUE. The assignment calls for at least two blocks measuring 20" x 30" in size. I am using Baltic Birch plywood for this matrix, and the wood is absolutely beautiful!

I plan on raising the grain so that its design shows in my print. I prefer raising the grain by burning the surface of the wood with a propane torch, but this can also be accomplished by wetting the board's surface. Wood grain has two densities of wood within it. Using a torch on the surface of the board burns out the less dense parts that can be removed with a wire brash post charring. This makes the linear patterns that you see in wood "stick out" (because the filler, or less dense wood, in between each line has been removed). Thus when I ink up my block, the ink will only rest on the remaining wood grain lines and print that design.

I did a little research last night on wood burning stoves and designed my own version based on several antiques I saw on various websites. I guess you could say that the subject matter is a tribute to the gorgeous wood block it is being carved from. Today I sketched out my image on my matrix.

After planning, sketching, and talking about male muscles with my fellow printmakers in the lab, I headed upstairs to the textile studio to experiment with a new technique that Professor Laura Strand demonstrated for us in class. The curriculum of my textiles surface design class is heavy in silk screening. The imagery that I have been exploring thus far includes a carnivorous pitcher plant, and chanterelle mushroom, and a tree trunk cross section. The pitcher plant is an image that I transferred to a stretched silk screen using photo emulsion. The "tree cookie" and the mushroom screens where created by a thermal imaging machine that burns tiny holes in a piece of plastic that is later taped into a frame and utilized like a traditional silk screen frame. The past several weeks I have been spending time with my images, getting to know them and how they work together. I've been working on a large sheet of white cotton, pictured below.

 

*note that each tree cookie is about five inches in diameter.

 

* pitcher plant detail

This afternoon, I started discharging, or removing dye, with a thiox solution. I cut a mask to use so when printing I would only print the center of the tree cookie. I then printed with my screen, but instead of printing the center image with dye, I printed with the thiox solution (a bleach-like agent). I then applied heat to the now dried thiox print to "activate" the reaction. The longer I left the iron on the thiox print, the more the print moved toward white in color. The results pictured below show the various intensities at which I discharged my image.

*The lighter circular design is the cropped tree cookie center that I printed with the thiox - you can see how it lightened the magenta color of the print underneath - but in a controlled design!

* This image shows the thiox print within the orange tree cookies and how it lightened the color.