P-10: Maniere Noir

Happy November to you all!

I'm just sitting here, enjoying dinner and an internet radio broadcast of St. Louis Blues hockey. I'm also wondering where October went. Next thing I know, we'll be midway through December and I'll be on a flight to St. Louis. (Woo-hoo!)

I feel like things are moving along pretty quick, but there's still a lot left to do here in Albuquerque before I get to go home.

We still have five or six projects to complete for Rodney's class. And we also have our big Workshop Proposal due for Marge's class at the beginning of December. We just started on our next crazy project for Rodney... but first I have to tell you about the last one.

After our last big project was finished, Rodney had to leave town for a week to deal with some family matters. Rodney's departure seemed like the perfect time to test out some of the revised instructions in the recently completed Tamarind Book of Lithography. We were left with instructions for a Maniere Noir project, which should have been a bit of a breather after the giant crazy project... but of course, it wasn't.

Maniere Noir is a subtractive printmaking technique in which a dark flat is created and then the image is made by scraping away the flat to leave white areas.

Here is some random Maniere Noir image I found on the internet. (I'd credit the artist but their name wasn't included.)



The original set of instructions called for us to create the background flat out of a mixture of asphaltum and ink. However, Bill suggested that we also try to make the flat with ink only. Bill's way is a bit easier, but some people say that you can't get the same subtle tones as you can get with an asphaltum mixture.

We started by defining two rectangles on the stone with gum arabic borders. On the left side, we applied the asphaltum mixture. On the right side, we made a flat out of ink. When we were finished, we used razor blades, x-acto knifes, etching needles and any other sharp thing we could find to scratch away an image.

I found it was more satisfying to scratch on the ink-only side, because the ink was so thick that I could feel it coming off the stone. The asphaltum mixture was so thin that it was hard to scrape without digging deeply in the stone.

Here is Mick etching his stone:



Here is Yuli rubbing her stone up with asphaltum before rolling up:



And here is Valpuri rolling up her image in black ink:



Probably about half of the class had problems with the asphaltum mixture side of their stone. For some reason, it just wasn't rolling up correctly. Unfortunately, my stone fell into this category. Here's what it looked like when I first tried to roll it up:



Bill suggested that I make a new flat over the top of my other one and start over. Here is my stone after I made the new flat:



Here is a close-up of the ink-only side of my stone:



I re-scratched my image and etched it as instructed, but when I went to roll it up over the weekend, it failed AGAIN! I decided to wait and see what Rodney thought when he returned on Monday. This is what my stone was looking like at that point:



Rodney helped me for quite some time that afternoon, but it was all for naught. In the end, Rodney just told me to tear my paper in half and only print the good side.



I was a little disappointed with the project. Mostly just because I felt like I had followed the project instructions exactly, and it still failed. Rodney thinks I "burned out" the fragile asphaltum flat with our hard ABQ water.

Since the class had such crappy results for the Maniere Noir project, Rodney decided to have us try it again, as a side project. I'm anxious to take another crack at it, as I suspect that it might just be a temperamental stone that is sabotaging these projects.