Printing Small!

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One of the joys of printing with Akua ink is their property of drying by absorption (rather than evaporation). This means as long as the ink is sitting on a non-porous surface (like glass, plexi-glass or even a plastic sheet) it remains open and will not dry. This gives you unlimited time to play around, daydream, experiment -- even walk away for an hour or a day.

Acrylic paint is the polar opposite. To someone used to working slowly and methodically, that stuff dries in a blink of an eye! But the push to work fast can be energizing. And because each layer dries quickly, you can produce a batch of finished prints in an afternoon. Sometimes, with the Akua inks, a week or two will pass before I can add the next layer.

A few weeks ago, I dug out a gel printing plate and junk mail booklets that were printed on quality paper with a nice matte finish. I don't often use acrylic paint and only had a small range of colours to work with. This is how things started out:

The face print was a happy accident. I pulled a print and the photograph on the page transferred to the gel plate and I was able to pick up that image onto another page and then keep working around the image. Just a note -- the print is for my own enjoyment and experimentation. Likely the photo is a copyrighted image and therefore not legal to be used for art that will be sold. 

I kept working on full pages and got images like the one below (the paint obscures the original image yet the underlying colour, values and shapes add depth and mystery to the print):

Couldn't bring myself to chop this one up but most of the printed pages got cut down to 9x9-cm squares. Some I used to make a concertina book. 

Here is another concertina:

I also mounted the small square prints on 5x7-inch cards. I had seen an artist's work presented that way on Pinterest and liked how it looked. But somehow my prints seemed unanchored in a vast sea of white. 

Eventually I tried adding a coordinating strip underneath and suddenly the compositions started to work.

Some of the prints were overprinted with hand-carved stamps.

This is one of my favorites.

I like how the pattern in the strip echoes the main print and how that bit of dark shadow anchors the tree. Here are two more of the 5x7-inch cards:

Below is one that I liked but it seemed unfinished. Then I added the collaged bird. And that opened up a whole other avenue. Here it is matted:

The prints below could also benefit from an additional layer and a bit of collage might do the trick.

Now I'm happily heading down that rabbit hole and will report in soon with what happens next!