P-3 and P-4: Counter-Etching

For the past few days, Rodney has been locked away in his office reviewing the final manuscript of the Tamarind Book. Normally, Rodney is glued to our hips, constantly circulating through the studio, offering advice and demonstrations. In his absence, we mostly just sit around and read magazines and stare off into space. Kind of like this:



Just kidding... I'm sure Yuli was thinking about something very important. Or maybe trying to translate what us native English speakers are saying.

Yesterday morning we had our class with Marge. But Marge is also very busy with the Tamarind book so it was MOVIE DAY for us! We started with Four Stones for Kanemitsu, the 1973 Oscar nominated documentary about a print made at Tamarind. The master printer in the film is Serge Lozingot, who had the best hair ever and never wore gloves and smoked in the studio. I'd like to grow my hair out like Serge's. I'm sorry but I couldn't find a picture. I'll keep looking.

We also watched a couple of other films. One was an old old film from the 40's of this guy in the middle of a park printing lithographs in a white long sleeved dress shirt and tie. It didn't have sound but was fun to watch because he was tasting all the chemicals! Crazies.

The other was some 1999 University of New Mexico production that was painful to watch. The only good part was when they showed Rodney circa 1999. Awesome.

Yesterday we also started working hardcore on our next projects. Here is a picture of my stone in progress. You can see that I've added some new drawings and solid flats to my counter-etched stone. In this picture I'm using a foam brush to paint a border of super-greasy shop black mix on the outside of my drawing. If all goes well, this border will print just as I paint it, solid black with no pinholes.



Once we got the new drawings on, we had to re-etch our plates and stones. The areas from the last projects that remained on the stone only needed etched half as much. The newly drawn areas would need to be etched from scratch. Since all of these areas are so close to each other, we had to be careful about what strengths of etches we were putting where and for how long. Here is Patrick etching his plate:



Here is the top of Mick's head (again):



In addition to etching our plates and stones, we also had to get our paper ready for the next round of editioning. This time we are using a white Rives BFK paper in the same size as last time. Here is Celina showing good tearing form (maybe):



And a beautiful stack of paper ready to be marked for registration:



In the afternoon today we got a demo on how to proof these next projects. Because there are so many different things going on in the plates and stones, we have to be selective about how we roll our ink. The big black borders will require a lot of ink, the finer drawing in the middle will require less. So we need to roll in a way that will give the appropriate amount of ink to each part. It's tricky.

After class today, six of us walked down to a nearby Indian restaurant for half-off Indian goodness. Here's Patrick putting the smack down while Ana makes raptor noises:



In baseball news, my Cardinals were briefly back at .500 after a win yesterday and had moved into second place. Tonight they lost and the Brewers won... so we're right back to where we started from.

I have to get up early tomorrow morning so that I can sponge on the "Pro-side" (Professional Printing Side of Tamarind... where the Senior and Master Printers work). I was supposed to sponge on Tuesday afternoon but it turned out that I wasn't needed. So tomorrow will be my first day at the job. Here is Valpuri sponging today for senior printer Sharon: