Happy Holidays!

Asian musicians ...

Getting myself in the mood for our impending trip to Bangladesh-land. I thought I'm unlikely to get any time to do much drawing while we're out there ... so I'd do some while we're still here! Not sure what the groom-chap is doing ... conducting the music (don't generally have conductors in Asian music), or directing traffic ...

Wedding Wednesday - part 9

Thank you everyone who came and made it such a lovely day ... 5 months in (yes, a bit late ... ), but we got there!

Making process here.

Thank you Adana

Phew! What a steep learning curve this has been ... Regular readers will remember that we procured an Adana 8x5 not too long ago; but then promtly stopped blogging about it. Well, we have actually been using it, but its been a lot of trial and error over several days. And with college and life, those days have been non-concurrent.

But I am pleased to say now that I think we have it (mostly) down, and have done our first two print runs (they are of the same thing - our wedding thank you cards - we just ran out of cards and had to go and buy a second box of supplies). Anyways, here's a kind of 'photo story' of the process. It's made up of photos from a couple of goes - so there isn't necessarily continuity in what's going on. Here goes... :

We start with my original design - then traced into the two separate colours (at the end I ended up re-drawing the whole thing as one piece and scanned it into Photoshop, and did the separating into two layers that way - and printed the two layers out separately).

Next, printed the layers out on acetate - in negative (for making photopolymer flexoplates).

I'm lucky that in my college they have the fascilities for making photopolymer flexoplates - it's a bit like making a silkscreen screen. There is a thin steel plate with some photoemulsion on it. You place the negative acetate the wrong way round on the emulsion and then expose it to UV light. The exposed bits harden (what you're going to print with), and you wash away the unhardened bits. Here are my two plates for the two colour separations.

Imagine then I've mounted the plates on wood to get them 'type height' and used some quoins and furniture to clamp them in place in the chase. I got some of this fab Caligo Safe Wash ink - and here is me inking the ink disk.

Even before we could print we noticed that the plate was inking up too much. This was not going to do ...

Not only was it over-inking, it was not sticking properly to the wood base. We fiddled with this for LONG time... We tweeked the impression screws; we tried to lift the rollers by putting layers of tape on the edge of the roller bearer (the thing the chase sits in); and all sorts ...

To cut a long story short, Sunshine eventually took the whole thing apart, cut the plates down so the edges were closer to the printing bits, and remounted them on wood that he had put through a special machine that would sand it down to the exact height. We made sure the plates were stuck down well, and we even had to hammer down some of the corners that kept getting inked.

Eventually though we finally managed to get it all working ... first print run we did this plate (with the rings) first - then the one with the figures. The second print run the following week we did the other way round as can be seen here:

I'm not entirely sure why I'm speaking like a child o_O ... also, when changing between the two plates, I did the old screenprint registration trick of taping down some acetate to print on, and then putting a card with the first colour on, underneath the printed acetate to align it properly. The Adana has an adjustable 'lay gauge' that holds the bottom of the card where you want it, and we used a piece of thick acetate to mark off one of the edges. You can see me pushing the card up against it in the video.

Final card to be unveiled on Wedding Wednesday tomorrow ;)

For Lu & Soph & Arran + Sharm & Snowball & Yngve

Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon (although I had to get the the lyrics wrong, didn't I? Its "miracle" not "miracleS" ... oh well

For all the new families ;)

Rosalind Franklin

Working on some favourite lady scientists ... Move over Crick and Watson; here you have Rosalind Franklin - the structure of DNA would not have been elucidated without Franklin's data and initial analysis .

... and as an added extra, here is some retro DNA ...

Sketchdump

Sorry there hasn't been much update on the blog recently - as life's been quite full with college; lots of dance classes and workshop teaching with DZ; getting ready for our Christmas trip away for the second leg of the wedding; and all sorts of other stuff (including the dreaded dissertation...). There are three big illustration-y projects I want to blog about too - but they are all for people so I'd rather wait till they receive them.

I've also been struggling a bit with my own self-directed stuff, but here's a sketch dump of some stuff I've been doing just to keep drawing...

I wanted to do something about scientists - and here's my attempts at Darwin (why does he always look like Santa?) and Einstein...

... back to those jazz musicians (and other characters ...)

... also been thinking about our trip to Bangladesh in two weeks ...