So many colors so little time

I am working on a two block linocut that will be printed this week. I carved both blocks, photographed them and am playing around with color options before I go mixing tomorrow. I liked several different ones for different reasons. If you have any opinions, let me know. It'll go through the press on Thursday...

The print is for a portfolio I was invited to join. It's due at end of April, but I need to get it done since I'll be out of town for the whole month. When I get mine, I'll post some of the cool prints. I am really looking forwards to it. Some awesome printmakers are going to be a part of it. If you have a place to exhibit it, let me know and we can put together a show.

Anyways, here are the four that I liked the best:

News and events

HI and good day! I am so happy that spring is knocking on our door. It gives me lots of energy to work and get things dine, which comes in a good crack, since I am trying to meet all kinds of deadlines before a month long trip out of town again...

I am curating a show from the La Familia Gallery for a space in Finland. It is tedious as normal to put all the information together from 18 artists. I just finished ordering the card for our show. So I am patting my back and relieving myself to get some lunch before I dive back into all the paperwork.

Our show dates will be April 20th-May 22nd, 2010. The reception is open for all on April 20th 5pm-7pm. The gallery is Gallery Golden Point, at Asematie 1A (through the inner court), Nummela, Finland. You can email the owner at raili.saloviin@goldenpoint.fi. Regular hours of business are Wed-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 10am-1pm, or with appointment.

I wanted to add a couple of pics of recent things I have been working on. I had made a series of linocuts last year, they were larger, so I wanted to be able to print them all on one page, so I scanned them all in, and made a polymerplate out of it. I printed relief on my little etching press, on natural colored stonehenge paper. There was a heavy embossment, so here's a picture of that.

The whole print...

These two are a recent commission of two children. I rather like the way they turned out, and the customer was very happy. What more could I want!

Z-Acryl testing results

We did some testing with the Z-acryl litho plates a while ago. I finally got to taking some pictures and editing them.

In the first picture you can see all the different media that worked - and did not work on the plastic.

• All liquid pens, permanent markers, sharpies, micron pens worked well.
  
• Regular acrylic paints printed solid, but where there was a slight dimensionality to the paint, it would give effect of a collagraph. Pretty cool.
  
• Asphaltum worked pretty well. It came off in areas where it was applied very thick. So if you use it make it a thin coat.
• Any kind of waxy medium like litho crayns or colored pencils did not work very well, they come off as you roll stiff ink on.
  

Now apparently, from my research, litho crayons work on Pronto plates. I have never used Pronto plates, but they are basically same as the Z-Acryl plates, but made by a different manufacturer and they are translucent. If you are looking for more into on how to make and print Z-Acryl plates, you can also search under Pronto plates, and get a whole bunch of sites.

Here are some that have some interesting info:
A great how to and digital how to from Kevin Haas
nontoxicprint.com
Another trial print by the Printmakerguy

One of the great tips I read in the third link was that if your plate starts picking up ink in unwanted areas in the middle of printing (scumming), you can wipe it with a solution that has a small amount of gum arabic and a pinch of citric acid in it. Apparntly picks it right up. So far I have been able to release the ink by just applying a solution with gum arabic on it, but I will keep this in the back of my head in case a crisis arises...

Ok, so as I had mentioned in a previous Z-Acryl post, you can run the plates through a lazer printer or copier. We gave it a shot too with an image that happened to be on the computer ready to go. We ran it through the printer and rolled it right up. I the printer heats the toner hot enough to set it on the plate. So here are some pictures how it turned out:

This is a closer up.
I just did this on the computer to see what would happen if we rolled each image up with a different color and printed them on top of each other on the paper.
Here is a super closeup where you see the halftone pattern of the digital image.
So hope that was helpful for some of you. If you just stumbled upon here and have no idea what Z-acryl lithography plates are, please go check out my instructional video here.