Printing (at home)

These are some prints I did at home. More than anything, I wanted to print them to see if there were any really obvious mistakes I had made which I could try to correct before going to the print room. One mistake I did notice was that I had not cut out the slit in the bishop chess piece properly, I have cut the extra piece out now which means that it should print how I want it to in the print room.

I did a set of prints on an off white paper (examples on pages 1-3) just using my hands to press the lino down onto the paper. This gave a nice textural quality but not all the parts of the image are clear and the overall print wasn't even because the pressure from my hands was uneven.

The other set were on thicker white stock and I used a heavy book to press down on the lino and I then rubbed the back of the lino with a spoon to add even more pressure to hopefully bring out all the detail. This worked better but I don't think these are good enough to use as my final first colour print. I also think the quality of my printing ink is an issue because it isn't very high quality and becomes clumpy after a few prints.

Although this hasn't been particularly successful in terms of producing usable prints, it has made my excited to get into the print room and print these designs properly. With better inks and printing methods I really hope that I will produce some results which can be used in my finals.

Sting

Using the linos I have cut, I printed multiple copies of the chess piece silhouettes to see what I could achieve with the same methods as the other prints. I think the two king chess pieces in the bottom right of that page were the most successful because the print quality is strongest but there is still some texture visible. These were done using a heavy book and a spoon. This piece is going to be the main focus of he sting so it needs to be a strong print and not fade into everything else that is going on. 

The prints of the other chess pieces are going to appear in the background of the animation so they don't need to be as striking as the king. Because of this, I would be happy to use the ones which printed a bit fainter. Possible the top or bottom row. I will have to put all of these into photoshop and play around with levels to find something I am happy to use.