Its been a while! Kitchen Litho 3 colour print.

I didn’t realise it had been so long since I have blogged on here. I think I have been distracted but for good reasons, I have a new job at the Hereford college of arts, and have been doing a lot of printmaking, so all good !

(Must admit Instagram has also been a distraction! )

Here was my design, it is a sketch of my orchid that I have managed to keep alive ( and its flowered again!!)

Anyway, on my sketch I added registration marks in the corners after watching the creator of this process Emilie Aizier video https://youtu.be/IyRmvt7jgpU on YouTube on making a greeting card with two colours.

The next step was to trace my design onto my tin foil, firstly I just drew through the tracing paper and then I went over those lines with soft 8B pencil.

I made three plates, the first one was the pink of the flowers the second plate to be the green of the leaves and the third plate was all the outlines. All traced from the one drawing so hopefully they would all line up .

This is a picture of the green plate, I used an oil pastel to block out the wide leaves and you can see the mark of the graphite pencil I used to draw the stem.

and here is the green plate inked up. I kept the oil pastel that I drew the leaves with, quite thin so I wouldn’t have to clean off the oil pastel before inking it up . It inked up ok, it was quite heavy and did not have as much detail as if I had cleaned off the oil pastel maybe, but it worked …

I printed the pink of the flowers first, it being the lightest colour. I used my little table top press ( which I have posted a video on YouTube about ) but you could print by hand just with a spoon,it’s easier if the paper is damp.

This is the plate after printing the final layer ,which are outlines, and you can see that because I didn’t wait for the print layers to dry between printing it’s has offset the ink onto the plate.

I thought this would be more of an issue but this time I left it awhile in the cola and it made it much more resilient to ink sticking to it. If you have left it long enough in the cola it does clean off quite easily between inking up. I think this was potentially where I was going wrong on my previous attempts not letting it react enough with the cola.

And there we go ! The final print… And I soon realized that I should think ahead, that because of the registration system I should have left a much bigger margin around the drawing and paper so you can trim it down and get rid of the registration marks…