Author: Carlo Krier

Engraving

A short video of the engraving illustrating  V. Hugo’s:

La dernière raison des rois, le boulet.
La dernière raison des peuples, le pavé.

Photopolymer plate

I use photopolymer plates mostly for relief printing if I want very fine lines.

So I spend some time drawing (pen and ink) several dragonflies:

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As I intend to produce a relief plate, the first step consists in the production of a negative of the drawings.

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Platemaking is done on my UV exposure unit (the one I use to produce electronic circuits) and washing out in the bathtub. (Not very professional.)

To see how it is done watch these videos on youtube:

– Photopolymer Exposure and Development (Nicholas Silberg)

– How to create a photopolymer letterpress plate (Genevieve Carroll)

The result:

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and the print:

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A very fine and explicit description of the process may be found on

Diane Longley’s website.

 

Summerakademie 2014

Printmaking course with André Michalek at this year’s Summerakademie.
Starting point is a picture taken by my son or by me (Who was it? I can’t remember as we shared the same camera) at the Völklinger Hütte.

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Fooling around:

How does it look like if it would be a coffee toned cyanotype?

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And if it would be a polymer plate printed in relief?

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And now the very first prints of 2 weeks:

The dry point on perspex version, trying to point to the regular structure of working environment:

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and the etching with aquatinta version, adding blacks and grays:

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Legs

Everything started with a joke made by my medical doctor: “You know what is common to a smoker and the Müllertal (touristic region in Luxembourg)? Be(e)fort.”

Befort is a small town with a nice castle and a famous liquor made from blackcurrant.

Beefort means “Leg gone” (amputeted).

Inspired by an old postcard saying “Best greetings from the Müllertal” I changed to “Best greetings from smoker valley”. Writing in Sütterlin handwriting.

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Some more images (mixed media: cyanotype, stamping, drawing, use of CT) by the same subject.

Experimenting: encaustic intaglio

The origin is an older (2009) intaglio plate (Zn). The plate produced was from a photography of a lane in Grevenmacher. The plate had been covered with photopolymer,exposed and etched.
The original print was intaglio and relief (2 versions, no edition).

I got the idea to print an encaustic intaglio using this matrix.  Encaustic monotypes/monoprints are well known:

 

    www.karabrookart.com/2012/05/encaustic-technique-encaustic-monotypes/

    dorothyfurlong-gardner.com/#/history/4534299082

    www.paularoland.com/

 

Intaglio encaustic is some technique which I haven’t seen yet.

The idea was to fill up the grooves with wax and to transfer to paper, the way you do it with normal ink.

Problems:

By heating the matrix too much the wax liquefies and spreads over the whole plate making it difficult to remove  the surface wax. So heat less in order that the wax becomes soft but not runny. Scrap the surface wax away with a plastic spatula, be careful not to scratch the plate.

A further problem shows up when transferring to the paper. Again too much heat prevents the crisp transfer of the wax. Although I don’t think that it is possible to get the neat lines of an intaglioprint. Heating has been done not on the hotplate but by ironing the back of the paper.

A first result from my experiments:

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One plate, two faces

My favourite chinese restaurant has several dishes on it’s menu card called “one plate, two faces”. These are dishes with two flavours on the same plate. Experimenting with gelli printing, monotype from stencils, regular acrylic coulors and fluo acrylic coulors I produced these images. According to the light conditions, natural light or blacklight they look different.

natural light                                                           blacklight