Collagraphy - First go at it

I'm running behind on keeping up with the desired weekly posts on this blog, so I am going to be posting a few different things today! Combination of my vision issues and personal activities taking priority lately.

I'm still in the printing studio and continued with the collagraphy plate I built (covered in my last post). I inked it and did a print but we discovered that the straw-hat varnish wasn't strong enough to hold all the botanical material I'd included - bits were coming off with the ink. So I only did the one print - which was quite nice.

I'm still figuring out the inking processes. My tendency is to want a lighter coating (as it looks neater!) but I need to be more heavy handed with the "scrimming" and leave more on the plate.

After the ink dried I applied a layer of yacht varnish and left it to dry. Below shows the difference - top is the straw-hat varnish, bottom is the yacht varnish.

Yesterday I ran the plate again... interestingly the varnish was still wet! The varnish was applied on March 30th and I ran it through the press on April 19th! I had so much texture on the plate that it was hiding in the pockets. But at least nothing was coming loose during pressing!

The first pressing was a bit messy - and we discovered the running varnish! It is sort of interesting as there are specs and smears of amber amongst the ultramarine blue ink.

It was really cool to see how the pressing process changes with each print. Different parts of the plate show up on subsequent pressings, not when they are expected to. Lighter areas on the first pressings suddenly start releasing ink - guess my heavy build-up of texture contribtes to that. On this series I did a little bit of touch-up inking on the sixth print as a leaf I wanted to see had disappeared - not very successfully. Inking is not a precision process I am discovering.

I'm also learning about papers - wet paper takes better impressions. It embosses the paper as well as picking up more colour from the plate. I have good quality watercolour paper but need to get some larger stuff. I was also using dry cartridge paper (because I have lots!)- which tends to wrinkle with the pressure. I'll be ironing the wrinkles out - or trying too! 

I am enjoying this technique very much and have been looking up artists online and watching videos to learn about different ways to incorporate it into mixed media work. I'm collecting all sorts of plant materials to use, and drying flowers and leaves to use in future work. Tulips get mouldy when you try to press them, by the way, but do eventually dry!