Printmaking!

Dry point Plate:

I decided to try out some drypoint etchings as I thought they would suit the line drawings I had drawn previously with a focus on the wood grain patterns and lines of the trees. I tried a variety of techniques and after re-photographing and editing some of my favourites; these are some of the results:

Playing with the amount of ink on the plate: 

Here I have tried printing using the cotton bud to remove some of the ink, leaving an almost vignette effect with more ink around the edges and a cleaner plate. Personally I like the vignetted effect as it adds some of the atmosphere of the forest back into the image. 

  

I really like these combination of colours, when I put them onto the plate they created an almost grain like appearance which I wanted to see what it would print like: 

The texture is interesting but it didn't quite work out like I thought it would: 

Book Paper:

I like using a lot of old book paper as a background, so I thought the combination of the texture and words running up the trees would be interesting however this didn't quite go as planned. Because the paper is too thin to soak I used a dry piece at first which didn't pick up a lot of the finer areas of ink except for the edges where I had left more ink on purpose for the vignetting, with some experimentation, I did eventually manage a very faint impression of the trees but not enough to create a well finished print. I think that these would work nicely as filters though, so I'm glad I tried it.

Flowers: 

I had a bag of pressed flowers lying around which I thought linked in nicely to the forest theme; initially I wanted to make up some collagraph plates using these but not having the money for mountboard I decided to see what would happen if I incorporated them into the drypoint process; I really like the results achieved, especially the imprints left behind on the plates after going through the press which I have included some photos of as the prints didn't turn out like them.  It would be interesting to see what would happen with something more translucent like a skeleton leaf.

Edited Prints: 

I really like how these came out, they almost have a childlike fairytale theme to them.

I photographed the imprints off the back of the plates too as I thought they might make interesting texture filters with the combination of tissue paper and ink: