Work diary: Sisters

Mon 13 August - offset litho, positive and negative

Here are a series of images from my first print.

I started by drawing the positive last night (Sunday) then amended some parts this morning. The last time I printed my work lithographically I was in my twenties! Somehow I had forgotten that even though it is an offset litho proofing press, the image was mirrored when the plate arrived! (from the room at the back of the workshop). It always looks a little strange when you have been imagining a particular composition then it is 'flipped'. Well this was a test! So from 'positive' to plate... and you can see the plate is a sort of greeny colour where the image will be sensitized to pick up the ink.

Then they printed it for me, and there it is, facing the other way, a composition based on a life drawing I did last summer in Oakland. It is great to see the work on the walls, they are covered in a soft board but I am provided with magnets to put everything up so there must be metal behind, to allow us all to view our work easily..and here is my work wall, with everything up there that I am focussing on at the moment.

There is also the 'in progress' drawing - 'sleeping' (working title) that I had to redraw the patterned texture on. (Those dots are the magnets as I am using a couple of overlaying pieces of drawing.

Of course I now imagine that it will be another 'flipped' image! Why didn't I think of that before... I think it was the excitement of actually drawing over a long period of the day, that I forgot to think of the whole process!

Tomorrow, Tuesday, I hope that I may test some of parts of the drawn imagery with photo-etching. This week for me is about seeing how my mark-making develops and changes as it is printed, what is added or lost on the printed image in the process. Meanwhile I continue to stay within the village...