Eva’s been busy during the lockdown and is happy to share her adventures with viscosity printing.
I started making collagraphs last autumn. Initially, I only worked in monochrome – but after about six months, I had got through a whole pot of Prussian Blue and was getting a bit bored with it.
During lockdown, I decided to learn how to combine intaglio inking with surface rolls in a different colour. In this method, the plate is inked and wiped intaglio with a fairly dense ink, usually in a darker colour, and then a loser, more transparent ink is rolled on with a single pass of the roller. Because of the difference in viscosity, the intaglio ink will repel the ink from the roller.
I have been experimenting with this method for a few weeks now, and this is what I’ve learnt so far:
- There’s no point in trying to save money by buying a small, cheap roller, as it’s almost impossible to cover the whole plate in one pass with one of those – it always skips a section, no matter how hard you press down! I eventually gave up and bought a soft “mini spindle roller” from Hawthorn, which is anything but “mini”! It’s a whopping big beast, and works beautifully.
- You can’t use Linseed Reducing Jelly to loosen the ink – it has to be oil.
- You need a lot of extender (transparent ink) to make the ink for the surface roll really transparent.
- There’s A LOT more cleaning up to do!
In my “Foxgloves” print, the darks were created by cutting into the mount board and peeling off the top layer. These areas retained the blue intaglio ink when I wiped the plate, and repelled the pink ink from the roller. The sky and the highlights on the foxgloves were created with diluted PVA glue. When I wiped the plate, most of the blue ink came off these areas, so they readily accepted the pink ink from the roller. I think the most interesting areas are those where the two inks have mixed, like on the leaves. For these, I used the surface of the mount board, which retained some of the intaglio ink.
My next step is to really get to grips with the viscosity principle by rolling on a third colour. Even though I think I understand the theory behind it, getting it to work in practice is another matter!