Ambitious litho project

Here is a short note about a project I'm working on in Lithography, and one of the reasons I haven't posted much about my litho work lately. I set my mind on doing a 4-color print in my "different spin" series. Those consist of a square plate with abstract pattern printed several times, rotated, on top of the same piece of paper. So there is less plate and drawing and etching work, but it's still a serious project because printing a litho plate is so time consuming... especially when you try to print in light colors (as I am).

So said plate was stitting in my drawer for over a month and I decided to do that other 2-color print first before I might mess this one up (and I'm glad I did that - I learnt a lot since then as you can see from the last 2 or so litho related posts). I hope I'll be able to avoid all of those mistakes.

Yesterday I finally printed the first color - yellow. And it came out very nicely. I did 13 prints which is good for an edition of 10 + 3 progressive proofs (or, if I mess something up, it will be a 8 print edition and 2 duds or something along those lines). Yellow is tricky because - first of all, you cannot use asphaltum for rub-up - instead you use the printing ink, thinned with Lithotine. And the press station has to be super extra clean which takes a lot of extra care and work. But all worked well and so next Tuesday (I hope) the next color will be printed over that. At that rate, the print will probably be done in about 2 weeks, considering I can only print really long printing sessions (we are talking 4+ hours each time) on Tue or Thu.

In other news: I'm also working on a stone again for a change and that project is a 2 color print from the same stone - I want to do some reductive work on the same drawing on the stone - just to learn that technique as well. Busy busy busy :)