Puzzle-print!

First of all - a reminder that this week and only this week I am showing 6 prints at a SJSU show. Gallery 3, art building, San Jose State. Reception is Tuesday night. Here is a photo of the 6 pieces I'll show there. Among them the print I'm discussing in this blog posting. See also previous blog post. It's a really beautiful show - not just because I have stuff in it, but because it's all really really good work. Here is a photo of the setup in my corner. The lighting hasn't been finalized in that photo yet, obviously. Anyway, come by and check it out live! 'nuff said.

OK, and now for the actual blog posting. It is about the second piece on the left in this lineup. It is one of the most tricky and often frustrating challenges in printmaking to get plates perfectly registered when you create a multi-color print. Just the tiniest mistake can very much disturb and destroy the resulting print. And sometimes it's not even the printmaker's fault because paper can change size a bit based on humidity and 100s of other factors. Multi-color prints typically are printed in several steps that are printed on top of each other. Typically, but not always. That's because there are other techniques to create multi-color, such as chine-collee (colored paper collaged to the print), "a la poupee" where parts of the plate are manually inked in different colors, "iris prints" or rainbow prints where you print a transation from one color to another in one layer and several others.

And then there is a technique which I call "puzzle print" although I'm sure that is the official term. The idea is that the printing plate gets cut into smaller pieces. These are inked individually, then put together like a puzzle and then printed. Rinse and repeat. This posting describes my experiences with this technique.

It sounds very simple, and in principle it is. However, the devel is in the detail, as so often. I didn't want to do a super simple puzzle print: I wanted a complex shape. I soon learnt that this is not so easy with the tools I had at home. After some discussion with my friend Bernie who is an expert in wood working (see Bernie's site) I learnt about the difference between a jig-saw, a coping-saw and a fret-saw. I had the first and the second, but not the third. And of course that was what I needed. Problem is: these things are sorta hard to find! The guy at home depot didn't even know what a fret-saw was supposed to look like! (it's a bit like a coping saw, but with much much thinner blades). Eventually it dawned on me that a fret saw is what we would call a "Laubsaege" in German. I had used one of these as a kid, like 30 years ago and hadn't seen one since... Eventually I tracked down a source for a fret saw and they even had one in stock. Oh, heck why not send these guys some traffic: Check out the Sawdust shop here in San Jose.

So now I had all the parts I needed (and I even aquired a set of kevlar gloves for woodcutting, in the process - very handy - pun intended). I sketched out my design and then came the next problem... Cut the plates first or saw the plates into puzzle pieces first? It was late at night when I faced that decision and I didn't want to wait to call Bernie so I decided to saw the plate apart first (I really wanted to try that fret saw ;) ). In hindsight that was the second best way to do it (out of two possibilities). The reason is, that my design had a few very small and narrow spots and it was much harder to cut the design on those pieces because I couldn't really hold the plate well. Oh well, live and learn.

Next I cut the design which came out quite nicely. Once I had all of this cut, I almost didn't want to print this because the plate pieces by themselves could go as pieces of art! My idea was to mount them, with padding of different height behind them in a shadow-box, illuminate at an angle and you would get a really nice 3-dimensional art piece. Now if I printed that stuff, the ink would get into the fine pores of the plate and I will never really get it entirely out again. The effect of the wood-relief would be gone. I was tinkering with that problem for quite a while. Eventually I decided to print the plates anyway but to seal them really well with shellac: the oil paints can be cleaned off with vegetable oil or turps which doesn't affect the shellac, because that gets dissolved by alcohol, not by turps or mineral spirits (Bernie's suggestion again - this man is a genius!)

The resulting print came out nicely and I'm glad I chose the relatively muted combination of colors you see in the final print. So what about the plates? Well... the experiment worked almost as well as hoped, but not 100%... there must have been a few micro-cracks in the shellac because in a few places there are traces of the ink on the plate that just don't come off. I might still go with the idea to mount the plates as a separate art piece. Or I'll just make a new set of plates. Oh well.

Now about the prints: the 4 plate pieces registered perfectly. No sliding around and the colors just printed nice an evenly. BUT: don't do fancy puzzle shapes like I did. BIG MISTAKE! It turned out that it was a friggin nightmare to actually put the puzzle together before each print!!! You cannot just slide them into each other, instead you have to carefully angle one plate in, let it drop in place, maybe even push it in with the corner of a spatula. The same in reverse for taking it apart. And try doing that with ink all over the plates when the plates are only 1/4 inch thick and must not touch and smear each other's surfaces that have different colors on them. Right? So that was a bit of a nightmare, but in the end it worked out OK and I got a set of beautiful prints. But next time, I'll make sure the pieces fit together easier!