Wednesday, February 8th, 2012...4:05 pm
printmaking
printmaking has become my favorite class of this semester. i think it is because i have the complete freedom of my own project. since this is my second time around with printmaking, i get to create my won projects using whatever process i would like to use. pretty cool right? the world of printmaking is at my disposal…
since my trip to el salvador, i have had a lot on my mind regarding all the stories that i heard while i was there and all of the pictures, sites and people i saw, not to mention, the work i contributed to (on that side note– they started working on the roof this past week at the house in san martin that we worked on!! i saw a picture of when the walls were almost finished! its crazy!)
i’ve decided that i am doing a comparative project, relating the violence in el salvador’s past, which is what i learned about during my trip, to the violence of the present, which is something i studied during my latin american history class last year. i am using images from the salvadoran civil war and images from salvadoran gangs to make the relationship between the two time periods.
today, i actually finally made some significant progress. i think i pumped out about 10 prints in an hour and a half using a citrus transfer method. i was having a lot of trouble last week because i wasn’t using the proper paper. i didn’t figure that out until the end of the class though, so throughout the entire period my transfer image was getting stuck to the substrate paper and ripping off the ink or ripping the paper. it was really frustrating. even when it did work relatively well, the blacks just didn’t transfer correctly, leaving me with blotchy dark spots. i was so excited when the first print i made today came out perfect. randal, my professor, was pretty pumped too.
he’s ordering me photo emulsion plates so i can make some prints with that technique. it’s kind of like etching, but instead of having to transfer the image by hand onto the plate, it acts more like film. i make a transparency of the image, expose the plate and that to light and viola! the image has been etched into the plate, ready to be used many times over. much less labor intensive and it doesn’t have the prestige of being hand done, but it still creates an incredible image. i did some this summer and they were beautiful. i am so excited to see how these ones turn out! gee!