Part 2
Once I exposed all the plates and laid them out on the grid I'd created, I inked them up and made some prints. At my best time, I can wipe a plate (this is intaglio, the ink goes into the lines etched by the sun, I wipe the rest) in 15 minutes. What I never managed to do was wipe it completely clean, or so I thought. This forced me to re-consider using white paper. I printed nicely on a rough gray paper, which camaflouged the grey residue left on the plate, but it was a non-archival wrapping paper and I wasn't about to put the whole project, which by now was costing me some real money (for me) and serious time. So I selected a variety of Canson papers at Binders, including a pleasant gray.
I also decided to forgo the folded format. I was pretty sure I'd make too many mistakes, probably very close to the end of each pull. So I made a complete set on smaller pieces of paper (the plates are 5x7 inches.)
After printing a complete set, I cut them to equal size and played around with waxed linen thread, creating loops to connect the pages that would have normally been folded and leaving them off the pages that would have been cut apart. The photos below show a small (2x3inch) mockup of the stitching and the completed first version. I call this a mockup too, but it's really my working edition, complete with missteps and extra stitching holes. I'm currently editioning the book, hoping to manage five complete books by the end of April. I'm also working on a container, but that's another story!
No comments:
Post a Comment