2nd May 2016 - One Year Of Litho

Over a whole year has passed since Nina and I started our Lithography Fellowship  (and as usual I am behind in updating my blog!). Like Nina (https://ninaoskarsdottir.wordpress.com/2016/04/15/one-year-of-litho/) I thought it would be a good opportunity to look back at what we have done and achieved. It has not always been an easy journey, the process is complex and sometimes physically exhausting and there have been many frustrations and tribulations along the way. However I have found it to be the most wonderful medium to work with and it produces marks of a quality that I have not encountered in any other print technique. There is also great sense of connectivity due to the physicalty of the process which I love. Nina and I work very differently, I tend to spend a lot of time on each individual stone (maybe its so I dont have to grain as many!?) which means that I havent probably experimented as much as perhaps I could have. As such over the remaining year I am hoping to play around a little more with tusche washes, transfer paper and also monoprinting as a means of mark making directly on to the stone.
Looking back over the year I have processed 11 stones and 3 photolithograph plates and have experimented with transferring rubbings, used masking tapes and added colour using monoprints, stencils, photolithoplates, watercolour, aerosol spray paints, collage and chine colle. I have also explored working on different scales with 4 of the stones that I have processed being quite small (less than 20cm  square - actually not traditional litho stones but the stones that we use to grain /physically remove the image from the larger stones when we no longer want to use the image). This has posed a challenge both in executing the drawing (I find it much easier to work on a larger scale due to the coarseness of some of the drawing materials used) and also printing the smaller stones. Lately I have tried registering two stones together with different tonal values to give a more complex image.

My huge thanks to LPW for providing this opportunity, ACE and of course to Serena for her endless patience and for sharing her vast knowledge!

Here are a few of the stones /prints produced over the year in date order - all the work relates to my continued work of Park Hill in Sheffield, the Brutalist Grade II* listed council estate

Very first stone experimenting with mark making, dry and liquid tusches and frottage

                       Second stone experimenting with marks drawn or rubbed on to transfer paper

        Next stone experimenting with dry and liquid tusches and also micro masking tapes

                                Print of above stone experimenting with colour using stencils

                             First  mini stone using masking tapes (not a huge successs!!)
                               

     
                                     Second  mini stone using masking tapes (Bit better)

Next large stone - experimenting more with tapes/rubbings /splattering / different dry and liquid drawing materials

                                                Experimenting with chine colle

                                 
                                                               3rd mini stone

                                                                   

                                       New stone to produce two stone lithograph print

2nd stone for two stone lithograph print which when registered with the stone above gave the print below

                                          Colour added using multiple monoprints (below)

6th. 13th, 14th April - Experiments with colour on 2 stone lithograph

Added colour onto editions of 2 stone print below

Using multiple pieces of cut varnished card as per blog 27th March I experimented with colour -monoprinting 13 different colours using lots of extender mixed into the ink to give the appearance of a glaze or watercolour wash.

These photos show the inked pieces of card placed face down on the print, the whole lot was then run through an etching press to transfer the coloured ink. The different areas of colour were added in stages requiring multiple runs through the press.
I experimented with lots of colour combinations but in the end preferred the variation shown below. I printed 4 of these but made careful notes and swatches of the colours used so that I could try to replicateit again.