Posted by Dave Bull at 10:10 AM, July 29, 2009
Continued from [Forest in Summer - 11] | Starting point of the thread is [Forest in Summer - 1]
Printing is now underway, and the first two impressions are done:
... and ...
Printing one directly over the other in sequence is not the way I want to do this, but my hand is being forced by the tightness of the registration this time.
What I would normally do is print the first base tone on the tree, then next perhaps print part of the open 'v' space you see there. This would help keep the moisture balance even across the sheets, and the general quality of the impressions would be better. Printing right on top of another impression right away can be difficult - if there is too much water in the paper, the next impression won't 'take' properly.
But for this print, because the registration is razor tight, I want to do the four impressions of the tree trunk one on top of each other before I add the grass in the open spaces. This will let me clearly see how they are lining up; once the grass stuff gets in there, the edges will all be far less visible and sharp.
But already - with only two impressions done - the paper is now far too saturated. Early this morning - before brekky - I went down there to test it, and finding it too damp, put some interleaving sheets between each pair of sheets in the stack.
But when I went down to start printing around nine, even through the interleaves had become completely damp themselves, there was still too much moisture overall. So I pulled them out, and replaced them with a fresh dry batch.
(Wow ... three paragraphs in a row with ... 'but' ...)
Anyway, as I write this, the stack is settling. Hopefully, it'll be ready to go soon ...
The thread continues in [Forest in Summer - 13] ...