April 15, 2013

Drawn at The Drawing Studio in Tucson :

I hired the Gloo Factory to convert one of my drawings into a 8 x 10 inch silk screen (printed on Mexican Amate paper).  Then I passed an edition of eight to the Contendio Neto collective in El Paso, which then submitted works from the whole the group to an international print show -- Dialogos E Interpretaciones II: The Americas:

The original drawing on newsprint needed to be scanned, to enhance the contrast:

The Gloo Factory tweaked and cleaned up the drawing in Photoshop (using levels and contrast settings), and then printed it with toner onto vellum:

Then we impoverished the drawing with threshold in Photoshop, to print a second vellum:

Ultimately we made a "two color" print (dark grey on gray).  Each vellum was burned to it's own screen, and  both screens were used to print the figure. The impoverished image (darker) was printed  over the cleaned up scan (ligher), which gave the figure more volume (my drawings tend to go flat and lose volume when printed with just one screen).

Essentially this is a "reduction" print:

I drove to El Paso to deliver my prints, and wound up presenting them to the printmaking class at UTEP on Saturday, April 27.  I also showed off the book of my drawings and the self-published catalog from the Tucson Sculpture Festival, which we put on earlier this year:

I think we need to self-publish a book of prints from throughout the Southwest, as well as show in Tucson, El Paso, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

The printmaking studio at UTEP:

Fascinating!  They were drawing on aluminum litho plates, with water soluble omnichrom pencils (by Staedtler) and sealing them with silicone  mixed with mineral spirits (65/35) instead of etching them.