Sunday 21 November 2010

ᄆᄆᄆmagentacyanyellowblack

a few months ago, at the push>process
exhibition {blogged here}
there were hints of new workshops
being held at the CoExist Gallery:
yesterday I was lucky to have a place at a
tempera workshop with Alex Chater:
he pre-prepared our images into negatives
for contact printing each process colour:
magenta, cyan, yellow & black:
the tempera process uses egg:
ammonium dichromate +
a little matt medium:
this produces the standard emulsion mix or 'stem':
the 'stem' base is mixed with magenta pigment:
this is evenly rolled onto a polypropylene
plastic paper and dried:
carefully, we placed our magenta negative
surface to surface onto the paper,
using clips to complete the registration:
placed into a contact frame and under
an ultra violet light:
exposure for my piece was 3 minutes:
after rinsing into a clearing bath for
three minutes to wash away the residual dichromate,
we used soapy rollers to clean off
the unexposed areas:
using other sponge pads {even mister muscle!} 
to remove parts of the coat until 
we were happy:
a final rinse in clean water then
dry completely:
with a magenta layer completed,
start again using a cyan coating:
at this stage I repeated both the magenta and cyan
making four layers:
rolling directly onto the dried paper:
it seemed quite scary at first,
worrying about applied pressure and
a danger of damaging the previous layers:
yellow x 2:
black x 2:
happy with the luminosity and subtle colours 
of my final print, it was cleaned of any residuals:
then soaked in white vinegar for ten minutes
and thoroughly rinsed under running water:
carefully dried:
silence
tempera print:
1/1:

{original}

2 comments:

  1. what lovely, subtle colours you got there….would be nice to see the original to compare with. Very interesting *strokes beard*

    ReplyDelete
  2. have added it for comparison:
    you need a razor for that love!

    ReplyDelete

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