Printing Workshops

Etching:

I definitely found etching the most difficult process to tackle. I had never done it before and there are a lot of different elements that you need to get right in order to end up with successful prints, and if something goes wrong along the way there is no going back and you may not get the result you wanted. I found the process a lot more time consuming than I thought it would be (lots of cleaning, polishing and cleaning again!). However I did enjoy the process and I learned a lot. I am not entirely happy with my print. This is because I rushed the drawing, as we only had one day to do the whole process, and you can't make a mistake and rub it out when drawing on the etching plate. I now see that the perspective is really wrong on the drawing, and so if I did etching again, I would make sure that my drawing was strong before I went into the studio so that my final prints would be better. 

Screen printing:

Screen printing was probably one of my favourite processes. I had never done it before either, but unlike etching I had an idea of the process. I really enjoyed the workshop, and screen printing is definitely a process that I would like to gain more experience in. I like the effect of the prints, and it's much easier to do a larger scale print compared with etching and relief. It was difficult to visualise the layers before they were printed, and the lining up was difficult at first. However I feel that as I went along, my prints improved. Although I only had time to do three layers, I experimented with a transparent colour, allowing the yellow and blue to mix to create green, giving the illusion of a fourth layer. This was a really exciting method because until I had printed the yellow over the top of the transparent blue, I had no idea what the green would look like. However, using a transparent colour made it a bit more difficult to get a clean print on the first layer (the transparent blue). This is because the transparency means that it acts a little bit like watercolour, and can be uneven in colour, but after a few tries I managed to get an even colour. 

Lino/relief printing:

This is a process I had done before, and so I was familiar with the process. However I enjoyed this workshop much more than my previous Lino printing attempts. This is because when I had done Lino printing before, we didn't have all of the big presses, and did most of it by hand, which made it a lot more difficult to get a successful print. I really enjoyed the collaging aspect, as this is something I hadn't done before with Lino printing. I really liked the effect of a random shape of colour underneath the black print. The most difficult aspect was probably lining up the layers when printing the second layer, as each one was done by eye. I would really like to use this process again in my work.