Kodak

More prints going on here in Liz land. Over the weekend I went to school (sigh!) and got a multi-color reduction print out of the way, it's a requirement to have one done by midterms...which are this week.

My Kodak camera makes its way into a lot of my artwork, I love it's vintagey goodness. Remember my wire version? And even before that it made it's way into still life photos many moons ago in community college. Well I decided to immortalize it in print, too.

After coming up with the design, I transferred it to my block...can you spot the fatal error?

The moral of the story is: Don't transfer your image at 2 am when you are not thinking...my Kodak logo is the "right" way on the block which means that it would print backwards!! Whoops! Doh!

And I even carved out that logo before realizing my mistake! Clearly, I need more sleep. So I had to scrape it all off and print just the camera.

How does a multi-color reduction block work? Well, I decided on three colors: silver, gray and black. You can do more colors, but each color = more labor and time. Even in Print, I'm a b&w photographer! You plan out where each color will be, hence the color-coded block above. It's challenging to plan out a block like this one, you have to think backwards and use the spatial part of your brain. I found it to be the good kind of challenging, it was fun.

I carved out the silhouette of the entire camera and printed it in silver. You always print going lightest to darkest. Next, I carved away those areas (in yellow) that I wanted to stay silver. Then I printed again, carefully lining up my paper/block, using the gray ink. Then I carved away the parts I wanted to stay gray (the green part of the block) and printed again, using black ink. I used the ram press each time. I made 8 overall, which was time consuming- I was rushed to get it all done in three hours.

It's a total pain in the butt to line stuff up, but I liked how it turned out:

There's some "noise" (carving marks) to the left of the camera, which I tried to avoid- but oh well. If I wanted, I could carve out the camera with an Exacto knife and glue it to unblemished paper, it's done all the time in the print world.

Anyhow, it's fun to do and gives you appreciation for multi-color printed things! Especially when they line up! Registration (aka lining your colors up) is a big problem in printmaking, no matter how fancy you get.