Collagraph building

Here's the technical collagraph post I promised. The print here was printed on Celtec/Sintra with plate prep found here. The ink is Akua Bone Black Intaglio and the paper is Rives BFK buff.




Cathy Savage
War of the Currents
11x15"

First, after beveling my plate, I taped off the area I wanted to do as a drypoint, which is shown as the white area with the two figures. I lightly sanded everywhere else where the collage was to go. The blue "curtains" are made out of decorative paper. The petals of the floral paper are thinner than the rest and it's enough to make a texture. Basically I glued all my papers down with Liquitex Gloss Medium and Varnish.
 

The areas on the bottom and sides are made out of a linoleum stamp that I carved to resemble wood. Here's a close up shot of a print on white paper using Akua Bone Black Intaglio (you can see the plate peeking through on the bottom right). To get this effect, I taped off the area carefully, spread a thin layer of modeling paste where I wanted the wood grain, sprayed my linoleum with oil spray from my kitchen, pressed it into the wet modeling paste, and topped with with heavy books to dry for at least 8 hours. Viola!

Up top I used white tissue paper from a gift bag for the vertical curtain, folding it as I glued to resemble a curtain. The War of the Current sign is cut laser printer paper and the writing is 3D squeeze craft paint. The ties for the sign are thread--which are fairly hard to glue down. The people and hands are done as a drypoint, so essentially created with different mark-making tools. I kept over wiping the drypoint area so I finally decided it needed to be wiped with telephone book pages with only light touch ups with a Q-tip. The rest of the plate was wiped with a soft paper towel.

And that, in a nutshell, is how this print was made.