New Year.

So, here it is. A (not-entirely) new take on a (not-entirely) old blog. Believe it or not, over the past year I've been making stuff! So this year, I've decided to start anew and share some of that with you. A logical first-post, it seems, are process pics of this past year's holiday card. It represents (for me) a new and exciting foray into photo-polymer plate production and potentially elaborate letterpress projects! WOOOO! Thematically, it's a tip-of-the-hat to Winnipeg winters and the daily commute.

After roughing out the basic idea, and promptly losing those pages, I sketched out the bike, and painstakingly figured out how Santa might appear atop it.

Then came a revised trace of the original drawing...

Followed by an inking, traced on a makeshift light table.

I've skipped a few steps here, such as: a) laying-out the type and vectoring the red layers in corel draw. b) printing 2 copies of each laser printed photo-negative on acetate, aligning and taping them together on a light table to double the opacity. c) exposing and washing the plates. d) post-exposing the plates to help fully expose them. These are the photopolymer plates! Expect a more thorough photopolymer tutorial someday.

This image demonstrates the plate affixed to a hardwood block, with a not-so-precise grid for alignment, registration, and reference locked-up in the chase. The block is shored up with some card stock to help bring the image surface to exactly 0.918". At the left is a test print. Fantastique!

On to the red! The crosshairs that appear printed in this test-print were used to align the block to the grid. They were cut off the plate before the print-run with an olfa knife. The holes at the edge of the paper are used to register the paper with screen-printing registration pins, that are affixed to the tympan. This method works surprisingly well! I'm eager to try some more complex designs to test it's accuracy...

Prints organized by quality, to some extent.

In the end, this project turned out pretty well. It wasn't quite as slick as some of my initial test plates and prints, but I think that was largely due to the paper selection. Stonehenge seemed fairly coarse and didn't deboss wonderfully. On the other hand, the use of screenprinting registration pins + crosshairs on the polymer plates allowed for surprisingly quick and accurate registration within an allowance of less than 0.5pt. I still need to figure out how to mitigate the appearance of a ghosted image, offsetting from the plate, to the rollers, and back during printing. It affects the consistency and overall quality, though only noticeable in large, filled-in areas. Hrmmmm...

Thanks for visiting. Hopefully I'll get into the habit of photographing more process stuff.
I'm even more hopeful that I'll make some more stuff worth sharing!

Cheers,

Drex

Music - James Taylor - Sweet Baby James

p.s. I'd like to also acknowledge the remarkably counter-intuitive and frustrating-to-use majority of Blogger's "tools". Awesome.