Boring Lithography Things

The past few days have been busy busy busy. I hate to bore you with more boring lithography things, but this is pretty much all I do now. I'm torn between reporting on the Tamarind side of things and giving you the gossip on my printer-pals and personal stuff. But I know that many of my readers don't know anything about printmaking, so I feel the need to give a little more background. Maybe the next post will get into the juicy gossip.

With our plates and stones drawn and etched, we've begun the process of proofing and printing our first two editions of prints.

First, a few definitions:

In printmaking, a proof is a print pulled from the plate or stone to check the progress of the design or of the etch. Basically, you're making sure that it looks like it's supposed to. This is also a good point for any major corrections to be made. When you reach the point where your prints are consistent and as they should be, that proof is marked as the Bon a tirer or BAT. The phrase is French and means "Good to Print."

The edition is (usually) a predetermined number of prints that will be made. At most print shops in the United States, editions are kept small- usually less than 50 prints. For the purposes of our first projects, we are printing an edition of 12. The goal is to get 12 prints that are identical and match the BAT print exactly. If this was a real-world situation, the prints would eventually be signed and numbered and the stone or plate would be effaced so that no more prints could be pulled.

So for both our plate and our stone, we first did a second etch to insure that the image was firmly established on the printing matrix. Next we printed the image onto 4 pieces of newsprint. If the newsprint looked good, we moved on to good paper and printed two Trial Proofs, one of which would hopefully be good enough to be marked as the BAT.

The eight student printers in my group have been divided up into pairs for printing purposes. One person serves as the printer and the other serves as the assistant or "sponger".

My printing partner, Alexandra, and I started the day by putting the second etch on her plate. Then we eventually proofed my stone, her stone, and then my plate. We had hoped to proof her plate as well, but we were exhausted and needed to get our paper ready for editioning. Fortunately, we were assigned to the electric press for this project, so we didn't have to worry about fatigue from hand cranking the press.

Our assigned paper size for the edition is 15"x20". The paper that we are using comes in 22"x30" sheets, so it was necessary for us to tear it down to size. We would be able to get two pieces out of one giant piece of paper. In printmaking, you generally don't cut paper with a knife or scissors. Instead, you use a ruler or tear-bar to tear the paper to size. Measurement is important and it is vital that all the pieces of paper are identical. The paper is next marked or punched for registration purposes. (Which I'll save for another day.)

Tomorrow is Saturday and Alex and I will be meeting at 9am to start the editioning process. There is another pair signed up for our press in the afternoon and we're hoping to be done before they get there so that we don't have to come in on Sunday.

It will be nice to actually have tomorrow afternoon and Sunday off.

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P-1 and P-2: Crayon Bands

We are now reaching the midway point of our first projects, so I figured I should tell you about them.

First, we had to prepare a stone and a plate to draw on. For the stone, this involved clearing the image surface with grinding as shown by Valpuri here:



With the surface polished and the image removed, some of us had to bevel the edges of our stone. Beveling the edge helps to keep ink and sponge debris from collecting on the perimeter of the stone while printing. Most people still use rasps and files and sandpaper, but if you have a severe edge on your stone you can also use a belt sander or something similar. Here is Ana playing with power tools (note the dust mask and eye protection):



And here is Celina doing some sandpaper work on the edge of her stone:



Since the plates are only used once, they will ideally be ready to use right out of the package... but that's usually not the case. To prepare them, we cut them to size and then used a counter etch solution to clean the dirt off.

Projects one and two are exercises in etching various shades and applications of litho crayons. Stones Litho crayons range from soft and dark blacks(#1) to hard and light blacks (#5). Because of the variations in grease and texture, a #3 crayon drawn over a #1 crayon will react differently than a #3 by itself. In order to print the image the way it appears on the stone, it is often necessary to apply different etches to different areas, depending on the drawing materials used.

To help familiarize us with these variations, we created a grid on both our stone and our plate. The grid was first created on mylar and then traced onto the stone/plate with iron-oxide transfer paper. It is possible to draw the grid directly on the stone but the mylar helps eliminate mistakes in measuring and placement.

With the grid in place, we started filling in the boxes with grayscales in each crayon (#1-5). Once the grayscales were completed in one direction, we did them again in the opposite direction, so that some of the bands overlapped.

Here is my stone, about a third of the way drawn on:



And here is Mick, working on his stone:



And here is Ana, drawing on her plate:



Once a few people completed their drawings, Rodney gave us demos on how to etch the stones with various mixtures of gum and acid:



Of course, he made it look easy.

Etching the stone helps to pull the grease molecules from the drawing materials into the stone so that those areas will accept ink. It also helps to desensitize the borders and non-image areas so that they will accept water and not ink when printing. Gum arabic is usually used by itself or in conjunction with other acids to etch the stone. A "hotter" or stronger etch is usually used in the greasier areas, a weaker etch is used in lighter areas. If a strong etch is used in a light areas, there is risk of "burning out" or losing the drawing. If a weak etch is used in a darker area there is a danger of the image "filling in" or getting darker than you wanted. A good printer will recognize the different etches and applications needed for the perfect print.

Today, most of the student printers finished drawing and putting a first etch on the stones and plates. Tomorrow, we will do a second etch and begin the proofing process.

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Alone and Aging in Albuquerque (AAA)

Today is the day that I turned 28.
I've been waiting for this day my whole life.
Or at least since I decided that 28 is my most favorite number.

Why number 28?, you might ask.

Well, back when I was young and impressionable, and the Cardinals made it to the World Series a couple of times, I decided that my favorite baseball player was Tom Herr. Tommy Herr, as you might have guessed, wore the number 28.



Thus began my love of the number 28... and if I was forced to choose between the numbers 1 and 10, I would pick 8.

I also like the number 8.... and because of my love of the number 8, I also enjoy even numbers more than odd numbers.

But getting back on track, I'm thinking 28 will be a good year for me.

It appears that Tuesdays are the day that I meet with the Director of Tamarind for our business class. However, Marge is so busy with a new edition of the Tamarind Book of Lithography that she sent us to the Library for our first class. We got an overview from the Fine Arts Librarian on how to use the system and also got a tour of the Fine Arts Library. Afer that I pretty much just worked on first project for the rest of the day. I ate lunch with a couple of my fellow printers (from Finland and Ireland) at Dennys (blech). And then I stayed at the studio until midnight. With a break for a few beers around 10:30pm.

I'm sure there was more today, but the high altitude plus two beers equals I'm really tired.

More later.

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Learn the Levigator in Three Minutes or Less

Today was my first day at Tamarind and I'm so beat I can hardly move my fingers to type this post. But don't worry... I'm a trooper. I'll try to fill you in as much as my tired body will allow.

Carrie returned to Saint Louis yesterday afternoon. After a fine dinner of Green Chile Chicken Enchiladas at El Patio Saturday night, we spent Sunday morning grocery shopping and counting down the minutes until she had to go. Due to the fact that the ABQ bus doesn't run on Sundays (because apparently no one needs to go to the airport on the Lord's day), Carrie had to drive herself to the airport and I could only stand in the driveway and wave sadly as she pulled away.

After her departure, I walked back and forth in my little house, trying to figure out ways to occupy myself. I cleaned, I made cookies, I made dinner, I worked on a print that I started two years ago. I tried to watch baseball, but it was blacked out. Then I tried to listen to baseball and it was rained out. Mostly I just wanted to make myself tired enough that I could go to sleep and be bright eyed and bushy tailed for my first day at Tamarind.

Of course, I wasn't really able to sleep. I had to be at Tamarind at 8am and after a few rough hours of sleep, I was up early to shower and eat and work myself into a frenzy.

I wasn't sure how to dress on the first day, since I didn't know exactly what we'd be doing. I didn't want to look too rough, but I also didn't want to get ink all over my nice clothes. In the end, the only thing I regretted about my clothing choice was the Birkenstocks that I wore. I spent most of the day standing and they weren't the most comfortable.

I arrived at Tamarind about ten minutes before class started. There were lots of awkward silences and introductions between the student printers. Then Marge, Tamarind's Director, welcomed us and went over a few things. We got our manuals and keys to the building and supply cards and lots of handouts. Then we spent the rest of the day with Rodney, our Education Director. After a few hours of listening to Rodney yammer, we were shown around the studio and given demos on preparing ball-grained aluminium plates and stones. Then around 3pm we were allowed to leave or start working on our plates and stones for the first project.

I opted to stay and start grinding my stone.

For those of you unfamiliar with the process, Lithography is traditionally done on giant hunks of Bavarian limestone. The nice thing about using stones is that after you draw and print your image, you can reuse the stone by grinding the previous image off. Some people prefer to use a slightly smaller stone to grind with. Other people use a levigator, which looks like this:



Basically, it's a circular hunk of steel, with a spinning handle on one side and a heavy counter-weight on the other side. You put water and grit on the stone, then put the levigator on top of it and spin it around and around until the image is gone and the stone is level and polished and ready to draw on again.

If you want to know more about this process you can go to a fantastic little page that someone put together about How Stone Lithography Works.

I'm not exactly a pro with the levigator. I think at least one of the fine institutions I attended had the device, but it just seemed so much easier to use another stone to grind with. The added bonus of using a stone, is that when you're done, you have TWO stones that are ready to go. It's like killing two birds with one stone. Or is that one bird with two stones? Either way... If I've ever actually used a levigator before, I don't remember it. Let's just say that this made for a very interesting couple of hours for me. I think it took me just a few minutes to get the hang of it, but it was still pretty stressful. After a good two hours of trying to undo the damage I did in the first two minutes, I finally got the stone in a state where I felt good about leaving it for the night.

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