The last litho (at least for a while)

My classes at SJSU are over - and so is my access to their print-making facility. And therefore, no more lithography for me - at least for the time being. I'm pretty sad about that, because I do enjoy the process a lot and I hope I'll have a chance to do more lithography soon.

Here are photos of the last two lithographies I did at SJSU. One of them is actually done on stone, whereas all my other lithographies this semester were done on aluminum plate. The top one (called "grasses" for now) is the one I did on stone. I decided to try a reductive process, a bit like I would do a reduction print with linoleum. It sounded like such a good and easy idea... well, it was much harder than I thought. And not only because I probably had a pretty hard stone. I worked on the stone by scraping with a razor blade. When that didn't seem to do much I took more radical measures, like scraping with a knife's point, screwdrivers and in the end I did a hard-core acid bite on the stone.

For that you use 50 (!) drops of nitic acid on 1 oz of gum, so this is a really strong etch. The etchant literally was smoking. I dropped that on the stone directly to bite out parts of the image. In that print the first color was the blue, over which I printed green. There are some round "holes" in the green. That's where I did the acid bite :) It was fun, to see how the stone started to smoke and bubble up each time a drop of that stuff hit it. It was also a bit scary, because that was indeed a very very strong etch and you should never take playing with strong acids lightly. It turned out to be a fairly interesting print, through I considered it more of a technical exercise.

The other print was developed out of some beautiful wood texture. I had found some old and weathered wooden boards on a construction site. I'm planning to use them for a woodcut. In the meantime, though, I did rubbings of those boards on tracing paper (with medium rubbing crayon). I put those transfers on the printing plates and ran it through the press at high pressure, which transfered the wood grain to the plate. One plate was mostly the wood grain. A second plate was the wood grain and additional tusche-work. The result is this two+ color print which reminds me very much of a landscape, although this is really almost a coincidence and wasn't planned that way. The reason I call it a 2+ color print is that the green is actually a very very subtle rainbow roll from a slightly blue-ish green at the top to a more yellowish green at the bottom. If you don't know about it you'd never notice because it's so subtle - just like I wanted it. I think this might be my favorite print I did, so it is a fitting final posting about my lithography work this semester.