![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
saint_monkeySorry ... This last entry in the "Teapot Print" has been a long time coming, I know. But I needed to have a minute to sit down and type it up.
First, if you want to brush up, the prior installments are here...
Part One (Picking the image)
Part Two (Transferring the Image to the Woodblock)
Part Three (Knives and Carving.)
So, apologies if anyone has been sitting around with a carved block for months, waiting to learn how to print it.
The first thing to do, is to have some paper to print the block! This may seem obvious, but funny story, I have made prints now for eight years or so, and I forgot that we did not move any printmaking paper, so I had no suitable paper available on the night that I began to print this teapot block. (More on that in a moment.)
Suitable papers must be "archival" which is a fancy way of saying, "acid free," so that they won't yellow or become brittle over time. Paper in a sketchbook, or watercolor paper, in fact, most paper made nowadays, is going to be archival. Even copier paper. The only papers that I can think of off of the top of my head that wouldn't be archival are newsprint, and kid's construction paper. Both are "cheap" papers, and a wash of a strong base to rid the paper of its acid content just isn't cost effective in the production of this stuff.
Another thing to consider for this type of printing is the thickness of the paper. Thicker papers will not print as well. Thinner papers may tear too easily. Practice with papers that you find at your art store, until you find one you like. I use Japanese handmade kozo fiber papers, like Hosho, Mulberry, or Kitikata. Normally. Like I said, for this print, I was unaware that I had no printing paper on hand, at all.
A good paper to use if you have no money, is brown shopping bags, cut open. They rock. The resulting prints are tough, durable, and look classy in a very bohemian way. Sometimes you can incorporate the pasted on handles, or even the store logo, because it is printed in a commercial oil soluble ink, and it will resist our water based ink.
In this case, I didn't need to go that far. I had some watercolor paper "blank cards" that I purchased at an Art Supply store on a whim. The funny part is that I had exactly ten of these, and the series size was ten. This means that any screw ups were going to be part of the edition. PLUS, the watercolor paper is THICK. Much too thick to hand print. But hey, them's the breaks. So the resulting prints are not as precise as I'd like, but they were nice enough for the exchange. Plus the finished prints had the advantage of being cards so I figured, anyone who didn't like the image, could send it as a "get well card" or something. It's pretty cool when art can be functional like that.
The first thing to do, is measure the dimensions of your paper. You may want to pick one side of the paper to be the back, and mark a centerline in light pencil marks. We are worrying about a contentious part of printmaking, called "registration" or ensuring that each print is placed on the paper in exactly the same place. There are many, many, many ways to register prints. (As many as there are artists, and every artist will swear that their method is the best, and that everyone should stop using the other methods immediately.) The style of printing we are practicing, called Shin hanga ("New printing") originally incorporated registration that was a series of notches and grooves, carved into the block, outside of the image area. All the paper was cut to precisely the same size, and the sheets would fit into these notches on the block, and away they'd go. I don't go that far for a small edition.
I tend to use a plastic xacto cutting mat with grid measurements on it. This way I can lay the block down on one of the ruled grids, and know that say, If I place my paper at the intersection of the 5 inch mark (horizontally) and the 3 inch mark (vertically) that it will always line up. (These are examples, you'll have to measure the block and the paper on your own and do the math for your own print.) Once you know where one edge of the paper will line up, mark your mat with tape, or a sharpie, or some way so that you can tell that your paper is lines up along the edge. (More detail on how to register in a little bit..)
But first, here are the other things you will need:
Now, inking. Take the stencil brush and dab little bits of the rice paste glue onto the areas of the block that aren't carved away. (The areas that will be black in the print. Don't put ink or glue into the white areas. (I shouldn't have to say that, but hey.) Use the ink brush to add little drops of ink next to teach dab. The red and blue dots in the picture below give you an idea of coverage. (This block was about four inches by five.) Think of the red dots as tiny bits of glue, and the blue as tiny spots of ink. You shouldn't be using a lot of paste, less that 1/2 a teaspoon to cover this 4 x 5 inch block. You can use quite a bit of ink, perhaps twice as much as you do paste.
Now look at those nasty green arrows on that picture. What do they mean? Well, after you finish dabbing your ink and glue, you want to take your flat stencil brush, and you want to vigorously and lightly spread the ink and glue over the surface of the block, moving horizontally until the block is covered, then vertically, then diagonally. You are trying to get the ink and the glue to spread evenly over the block in a thin, consistent layer. (You can tell if you have achieved this by looking at the light reflecting off of the block at an angle. My old mentor said that we are looking for an "even blue sheen" that doesn't ripple as you tilt the block. I found that this description helps me recognize the right state. maybe it well help you, too.) When you see that the surface is evenly covered, with no thicker areas, you are ready to lay down the paper.
It may seem obvious, but here is how it works
This is also where the gloves come in. You want to take off your gloves if you used them to ink, and put on clean ones to handle your paper. Having these two gloves helps you from getting inky finger marks on the wrong parts of the print. You may want to take some scraps of clean paper to make little paper "tongs" so that you are always handling the paper with other clean paper. Keeping the paper clean, and proper registration, are the hallmarks of a good printer.
Speaking of registration...
In the picture below, you can see how this works. on the blue mat you have a red line which represents the marks you've made so that you can place the block on the mat in the same place each time. The blue line, represents your paper registration mark. Hold the paper away from the block with the hand marked "2" and use the hand marked "1" to line up one edge of the paper along one registration mark, (In this case, the vertical one,) when you are good, hold the paper down firmly with "1" and let go with "2," and the paper should fall onto the block. Do this the same way, every time, and your registration should fall in the same place each time. (Are you getting the idea that printmaking is a very ritualistic thing? It is.) You can see that had we marked off the centerline on the paper, and put a mark on the vertical registration line that would line up on a properly place peice of paper, we could add another "check" to ensure prooper registration.)
This method (called the grid method, because of our gridded mat, (usually, you'd use another sheet of paper to make a grid... but why do that when these gridded mats are available?)) will work well as a registration method for images in a series. If you want to print in color, you'll need a more precise method of registration, one that allows no error to occur. But we will save that for another lesson.
After you've placed your paper, you will take your spoon and rub in a circle along the back of the print, pressing the paper onto the block.
What you can't see in the picture is that you want your arm to be straight, and you want to push down from the shoulder, not from the forearm. You also don't want to rub off of the edge of the block, you'll push the paper down along the edge, and the block will act just like the edge of a ruler, and tear a nice line right into the middle of the print.
The traditional tool for this is not a spoon, but a flat bamboo leaf covered object called a ba-ren. Plastic barens and metal ones made with drum head plastic can be found in art supply stores, but they do not work as well as the spoon, IMHO. There are a few people in Japan (less than ten) that can still make you the traditional tool. It had a handle above a circle, and let you push from the shoulder easier than the spoon does. I've heard that a child's wooden alphabet block, polished with waxed paper, imitates this expensive, hard to find traditional tool rather well. I keep looking for these blocks in goodwill, but haven't found any yet.
Anyhow, after you've rubbed for about a minute, lift up the edge and see if the image has transferred. When you are ready, pull the paper gently off of the block. The first two will not look good. This is because the block is not "charged" with enough ink to get a clean transfer. So print your first two on a cheaper paper. These weaker images are "test proofs," and some people save them for their portfolio to show process improvement, or give them to friends, others throw them away. Usually you plan for five bad prints out of an edition of twenty.
Anyhow, the third and subsequent print should look cleaner. Keep printing until you have your edition.
This method requires vigilance. You'll run into three printing problems with this technique, and you'll want to look for them after each "pull." The first, and most common, are "holidays" or little spots of white in the middle of the black where the ink has "gone on holiday," I kid you not, that is the term of art for it. Printmakers are whimsical, it seems. If you don't lift the print completely off, and lift it enough to just peek under the block, you can sometimes see the holidays, and carefully sneak in under there with the ink dauber and put a tiny little spot in there. Better though, is to pull the print, and touch up the final print with a inked up brush, and no-one will ever know.
The second problem is "scumming" or areas where the ink and glue have built up in the carved away hollows so much that the clean edge of your carved line is blurred, or worse, smaller carved away areas of white simply disappear, because they fill with glue and ink. The cure for this is to use your damp cloth to clean off the block entirely, and then charge it up with two more throwaway proof prints before continuing with the edition.
The third problem is fiber. If you've put on too much glue, or if you've rubbed for too long, the paper may leave bits of fiber behind on the block. These can pile up in the cracks, and can cause later prints to stick to the block. Once again, the answer here is to clean the block off when you encounter these, then charge the block again and keep printing. You can also "mist" your paper lightly with water in a spray bottle, and this should make the fibers expand, and make them hold ink a little better without so much rubbing. You can also find yourself rubbing a hole into the back of the paper. If this happens, place a small sheet of waxed paper on the back of the paper, and rub the spoon on that. It'll help polish your spoon up as well.
This style of printing is hard to get the hang of. My first edition of ten good prints using this method, required around thirty trial prints. Recently I adapted this method of inking a little bit and got good results without as much hassle. (The "Bent eagle" print I posted a couple of weeks ago, is the print I'm talking about.) If I can get solid results with this newer style of inking, I will put up another post showing you how to set it up, but it does require some specialized equipment, and I've been trying to shy away from that.)
A final note... You'll notice, that in addition to the stuff listed on this page, you only need an iron, availability of a Xerox, a hunk of wood, paper, and carving knives to make this style of print. Initial setup is perhaps $50, and you can make a lot of prints. I bet you could get $7 to $10 for a rough image like this (maybe a little more interesting, perhaps) on esty or ebay, and color images can sell for a lot more. And since it is a print, there are multiples, so it begins to add up. I've made images that sold for $50 to $175 dollars (unmatted and unframed) using the materials and methods we've covered in this tutorial, and I've traded with other artists for jewelrey and clothing worth much more than the prints themselves. (Just looking at them pragmatically, not asthetically.) Don't get me wrong, this isn't the new Amway or anything, just a way to make images you would make anyway, and have the possibility of sharing them with other people for money.
First, if you want to brush up, the prior installments are here...
Part One (Picking the image)
Part Two (Transferring the Image to the Woodblock)
Part Three (Knives and Carving.)
So, apologies if anyone has been sitting around with a carved block for months, waiting to learn how to print it.
The first thing to do, is to have some paper to print the block! This may seem obvious, but funny story, I have made prints now for eight years or so, and I forgot that we did not move any printmaking paper, so I had no suitable paper available on the night that I began to print this teapot block. (More on that in a moment.)
Suitable papers must be "archival" which is a fancy way of saying, "acid free," so that they won't yellow or become brittle over time. Paper in a sketchbook, or watercolor paper, in fact, most paper made nowadays, is going to be archival. Even copier paper. The only papers that I can think of off of the top of my head that wouldn't be archival are newsprint, and kid's construction paper. Both are "cheap" papers, and a wash of a strong base to rid the paper of its acid content just isn't cost effective in the production of this stuff.
Another thing to consider for this type of printing is the thickness of the paper. Thicker papers will not print as well. Thinner papers may tear too easily. Practice with papers that you find at your art store, until you find one you like. I use Japanese handmade kozo fiber papers, like Hosho, Mulberry, or Kitikata. Normally. Like I said, for this print, I was unaware that I had no printing paper on hand, at all.
A good paper to use if you have no money, is brown shopping bags, cut open. They rock. The resulting prints are tough, durable, and look classy in a very bohemian way. Sometimes you can incorporate the pasted on handles, or even the store logo, because it is printed in a commercial oil soluble ink, and it will resist our water based ink.
In this case, I didn't need to go that far. I had some watercolor paper "blank cards" that I purchased at an Art Supply store on a whim. The funny part is that I had exactly ten of these, and the series size was ten. This means that any screw ups were going to be part of the edition. PLUS, the watercolor paper is THICK. Much too thick to hand print. But hey, them's the breaks. So the resulting prints are not as precise as I'd like, but they were nice enough for the exchange. Plus the finished prints had the advantage of being cards so I figured, anyone who didn't like the image, could send it as a "get well card" or something. It's pretty cool when art can be functional like that.
The first thing to do, is measure the dimensions of your paper. You may want to pick one side of the paper to be the back, and mark a centerline in light pencil marks. We are worrying about a contentious part of printmaking, called "registration" or ensuring that each print is placed on the paper in exactly the same place. There are many, many, many ways to register prints. (As many as there are artists, and every artist will swear that their method is the best, and that everyone should stop using the other methods immediately.) The style of printing we are practicing, called Shin hanga ("New printing") originally incorporated registration that was a series of notches and grooves, carved into the block, outside of the image area. All the paper was cut to precisely the same size, and the sheets would fit into these notches on the block, and away they'd go. I don't go that far for a small edition.
I tend to use a plastic xacto cutting mat with grid measurements on it. This way I can lay the block down on one of the ruled grids, and know that say, If I place my paper at the intersection of the 5 inch mark (horizontally) and the 3 inch mark (vertically) that it will always line up. (These are examples, you'll have to measure the block and the paper on your own and do the math for your own print.) Once you know where one edge of the paper will line up, mark your mat with tape, or a sharpie, or some way so that you can tell that your paper is lines up along the edge. (More detail on how to register in a little bit..)
But first, here are the other things you will need:
- They are:
- PVC gloves
- Black "sumi" ink, (available at a Japanese stationary store. ~$4)
- Dish 1, for ink
- Rice paste glue, (also available at a stationary store. ~$2)
- Dish 2, for the paste
- Bamboo rice spoon, or a standard wooded table spoon, its back rubbed with wax paper obsessively for hours until smooth and polished. Invest in the bamboo spoon, it is harder, and will polish up much faster.
- Soft, larger pointed brush, for ink
- Round, flat "stencil" brush, for glue
- Aforementioned plastic xacto mat
- Your finished block, soaked overnight in water. If you do not soak it, the ink will just get sucked into the fibers of the dry wood. The wet block also keeps your print from sticking to the block as much.
- Not pictured, far away until we need it, our paper
- Also not pictured, an apron, to keep ink off of you
- Also not pictured, a wet cloth in water, to scrub off the ink and glue from the block from time to time.
Now, inking. Take the stencil brush and dab little bits of the rice paste glue onto the areas of the block that aren't carved away. (The areas that will be black in the print. Don't put ink or glue into the white areas. (I shouldn't have to say that, but hey.) Use the ink brush to add little drops of ink next to teach dab. The red and blue dots in the picture below give you an idea of coverage. (This block was about four inches by five.) Think of the red dots as tiny bits of glue, and the blue as tiny spots of ink. You shouldn't be using a lot of paste, less that 1/2 a teaspoon to cover this 4 x 5 inch block. You can use quite a bit of ink, perhaps twice as much as you do paste.
Now look at those nasty green arrows on that picture. What do they mean? Well, after you finish dabbing your ink and glue, you want to take your flat stencil brush, and you want to vigorously and lightly spread the ink and glue over the surface of the block, moving horizontally until the block is covered, then vertically, then diagonally. You are trying to get the ink and the glue to spread evenly over the block in a thin, consistent layer. (You can tell if you have achieved this by looking at the light reflecting off of the block at an angle. My old mentor said that we are looking for an "even blue sheen" that doesn't ripple as you tilt the block. I found that this description helps me recognize the right state. maybe it well help you, too.) When you see that the surface is evenly covered, with no thicker areas, you are ready to lay down the paper.
It may seem obvious, but here is how it works
| paper ... goes on top of... |
| block, sitting inky face up on the ... |
| xacto mat, which lays on the ... |
| table. |
This is also where the gloves come in. You want to take off your gloves if you used them to ink, and put on clean ones to handle your paper. Having these two gloves helps you from getting inky finger marks on the wrong parts of the print. You may want to take some scraps of clean paper to make little paper "tongs" so that you are always handling the paper with other clean paper. Keeping the paper clean, and proper registration, are the hallmarks of a good printer.
Speaking of registration...
In the picture below, you can see how this works. on the blue mat you have a red line which represents the marks you've made so that you can place the block on the mat in the same place each time. The blue line, represents your paper registration mark. Hold the paper away from the block with the hand marked "2" and use the hand marked "1" to line up one edge of the paper along one registration mark, (In this case, the vertical one,) when you are good, hold the paper down firmly with "1" and let go with "2," and the paper should fall onto the block. Do this the same way, every time, and your registration should fall in the same place each time. (Are you getting the idea that printmaking is a very ritualistic thing? It is.) You can see that had we marked off the centerline on the paper, and put a mark on the vertical registration line that would line up on a properly place peice of paper, we could add another "check" to ensure prooper registration.)
This method (called the grid method, because of our gridded mat, (usually, you'd use another sheet of paper to make a grid... but why do that when these gridded mats are available?)) will work well as a registration method for images in a series. If you want to print in color, you'll need a more precise method of registration, one that allows no error to occur. But we will save that for another lesson.
After you've placed your paper, you will take your spoon and rub in a circle along the back of the print, pressing the paper onto the block.
What you can't see in the picture is that you want your arm to be straight, and you want to push down from the shoulder, not from the forearm. You also don't want to rub off of the edge of the block, you'll push the paper down along the edge, and the block will act just like the edge of a ruler, and tear a nice line right into the middle of the print.
The traditional tool for this is not a spoon, but a flat bamboo leaf covered object called a ba-ren. Plastic barens and metal ones made with drum head plastic can be found in art supply stores, but they do not work as well as the spoon, IMHO. There are a few people in Japan (less than ten) that can still make you the traditional tool. It had a handle above a circle, and let you push from the shoulder easier than the spoon does. I've heard that a child's wooden alphabet block, polished with waxed paper, imitates this expensive, hard to find traditional tool rather well. I keep looking for these blocks in goodwill, but haven't found any yet.
Anyhow, after you've rubbed for about a minute, lift up the edge and see if the image has transferred. When you are ready, pull the paper gently off of the block. The first two will not look good. This is because the block is not "charged" with enough ink to get a clean transfer. So print your first two on a cheaper paper. These weaker images are "test proofs," and some people save them for their portfolio to show process improvement, or give them to friends, others throw them away. Usually you plan for five bad prints out of an edition of twenty.
Anyhow, the third and subsequent print should look cleaner. Keep printing until you have your edition.
This method requires vigilance. You'll run into three printing problems with this technique, and you'll want to look for them after each "pull." The first, and most common, are "holidays" or little spots of white in the middle of the black where the ink has "gone on holiday," I kid you not, that is the term of art for it. Printmakers are whimsical, it seems. If you don't lift the print completely off, and lift it enough to just peek under the block, you can sometimes see the holidays, and carefully sneak in under there with the ink dauber and put a tiny little spot in there. Better though, is to pull the print, and touch up the final print with a inked up brush, and no-one will ever know.
The second problem is "scumming" or areas where the ink and glue have built up in the carved away hollows so much that the clean edge of your carved line is blurred, or worse, smaller carved away areas of white simply disappear, because they fill with glue and ink. The cure for this is to use your damp cloth to clean off the block entirely, and then charge it up with two more throwaway proof prints before continuing with the edition.
The third problem is fiber. If you've put on too much glue, or if you've rubbed for too long, the paper may leave bits of fiber behind on the block. These can pile up in the cracks, and can cause later prints to stick to the block. Once again, the answer here is to clean the block off when you encounter these, then charge the block again and keep printing. You can also "mist" your paper lightly with water in a spray bottle, and this should make the fibers expand, and make them hold ink a little better without so much rubbing. You can also find yourself rubbing a hole into the back of the paper. If this happens, place a small sheet of waxed paper on the back of the paper, and rub the spoon on that. It'll help polish your spoon up as well.
This style of printing is hard to get the hang of. My first edition of ten good prints using this method, required around thirty trial prints. Recently I adapted this method of inking a little bit and got good results without as much hassle. (The "Bent eagle" print I posted a couple of weeks ago, is the print I'm talking about.) If I can get solid results with this newer style of inking, I will put up another post showing you how to set it up, but it does require some specialized equipment, and I've been trying to shy away from that.)
A final note... You'll notice, that in addition to the stuff listed on this page, you only need an iron, availability of a Xerox, a hunk of wood, paper, and carving knives to make this style of print. Initial setup is perhaps $50, and you can make a lot of prints. I bet you could get $7 to $10 for a rough image like this (maybe a little more interesting, perhaps) on esty or ebay, and color images can sell for a lot more. And since it is a print, there are multiples, so it begins to add up. I've made images that sold for $50 to $175 dollars (unmatted and unframed) using the materials and methods we've covered in this tutorial, and I've traded with other artists for jewelrey and clothing worth much more than the prints themselves. (Just looking at them pragmatically, not asthetically.) Don't get me wrong, this isn't the new Amway or anything, just a way to make images you would make anyway, and have the possibility of sharing them with other people for money.
