Hands

Words to follow - in the morning when my brain is working again!

Words!
I'd been really looking forward to attending this workshop in Nottingham and then it looked like the weather was going to prevent me from getting there. Sleet and snow were coming down as I set off and the cars had a several centimetre covering on the windscreen. The snow always gets worse as you head up the hill out of our village so it's never clear what it will be like elsewhere, but as I headed east towards the motorway it gradually turned to rain - which continued in lashing torrents all the way to Nottingham. Despite some worries about a sign that said diversion I made it to the course building with 5 minutes to spare.

So the printmaking process - it's a photographic transfer process - you have to expose the print plate to light - the first image shows prints being placed inside a UV lightbox (the sun would act in the smae way for those of you who know what sun is!) After a 40 secs exposure time it's taken out - put inside a dark box to prevent excess light getting to the plate and then taken outside to be washed off. The areas that have not been exposed to light dissolve in the water and are removed with the help of a soft brush. Health & safety seems to be the thing now and the person who was doing the washing off donned a large mask with air filters - juts in case of fumes. I have to confess that when I did my last two plates on my own I ignored the mask and wasn't aware of any fumes - it was outside after all and the wind was doing its thing! Although it appears to be quite a convoluted process I think you'd quickly work out a system - but the plates are expensive and you do need certain other equipment to ensure the process works OK, so I need to think carefully about whether I want to take it further. What struck me was that the process works very well where you want a more photographic image and it produced a very effective rendering of my photoshop manipulated starling - the detail is really lovely, but I'm not so sure about its use for images based on a drawing which I think work well using other print making techniques.

Anxious about the snow, I left early afternoon with two first proofs - which I will be able to print again on Thursday. Fortunately I didn't run into any snow until I was almost home and even then the roads were wet. We've had another covering overnight which I expect to go quickly today - when will spring come? I thought it was on its way last week!