I wanted to produce some practical research in print and decided in the timeframe I had to experiment and practice I could combine two print processes.
These were screen printing and embossing.
To begin my practical research, I needed something to print. To dust off my old drawing/illustrator skills I came to the decision to illustrate a fox and a moon and experiment with pointilism to bring out an old school tattoo aesthetic within it.
Below I have attached photos of the design process:
After completing the hand rendered drawing I scanned it in and re-created it with the pen tool at the same time as fixing errors and imperfections.
After using illustrator to vector the design, I then placed that into an A3 canvas in Photoshop and worked on the dot shading to bring some tone and depth into the piece.
Now that was ready to be printed I needed to prepare the embossing. To do the embossing I decided to use the instructions I was given by Nathan in level 6 about copper etching a design to press that into the stock.
I came to the decision to emboss my current identity logo in the bottom left corner of the screen print as a symbol of branding to my own name.
After printing these off for preparation I went down to the Rossington Street print studio to get everything prepared for print and organised with them to prepare the screen at 3:00pm for printing the next day and also organised an induction to copper etching at 10:00am the next day too. That will give me the knowledge I need to create and then use my copper plate early next week to finish off my screen prints with the final details.
I went down to the print studio at 3:00pm to get started and got the ball rolling straight away.
The final outcome was really strong, detailed and had a wonderfully professional effect to it but after experiencing how much money it would cost to create an A3 plate for embossing I soon realised it just wasn't realistic.
This lead me to ask if there was an alternative to copper etching and was told about creating an embossing plate by laser cutting the logo from a piece of grey-board or mdf. I then booked myself into the next possible laser cutting induction and began my wait before I could get on board with it. However this created one problem which was the design for laser cut, I wouldnt be able to do my logo as the pieces inside for details would fall away.
I will have to create a new logo to emboss into the bottom left of my print which didn't have any inner details. My idea was to create a paw print logo which would fit the aesthetics nicely and still finish the product with a professional look.
I researched into what a fox's paw print looked like and then re-created it on illustrator.
From what I could see they were made up of a palm print, four fingers and four claws.
This will be what I will book in to laser cut once my induction is complete. In the mean time I would like to dab into other printing practices to enhance my knowledge of practice.
A method I have never had a proper go at is lino-printing, for this I want to create a typographic piece to work on during my studio development time whilst I waited till my induction to laser cutting.
This was my process:
 |
| This was the second time I cut myself whilst carving lino. |
I was really happy with the results I achieved considering I had never done lino cutting/printing before. The prints were left on the rack for the weekend and picked up on the Monday.
The laser-cutting induction was fascinating as I hadn't ever done it/seen it before, after this was done I booked it for the day after the next to jump straight into it to create my embossing plate for my fox prints.
When it came to doing my own cut, I bought some 3mm ply wood and cut it down to just over A3 before setting up the machine and then running my design through the software.
My embossing plate was now ready so I went down to Rossington Street Print Department and I put it to use. First I sanded off the burnt edges to prevent marks from appearing on the prints, then I used the hydraulic nipping press to push the stock into my wooden plate to create the emboss. I used a pressure of 7000psi to create it.
The next thing I wanted to investigate was foiling via screen print. I was told that you could screen print a glue and then foil that to create a foiled aesthetic. This was something I wanted to have a go with so I did. I created a file in illustrator and then proceeded with the exact same process to prepare the screen as before.
The foiling had a mixture of outcomes, the gold one came out very nicely and how it should of but the silver ones wouldn't stick when in the head press.
I enjoyed the process and look forward to trying it out again in some different practices.
The next thing I did was a book binding induction to increase my knowledge on binding as well as learn how to do it. This was my process and final outcome:
This was a great induction on how to create a book, I learned a lot of practical skills and it has influenced me to try different methods and experiment with my crafting skills a bit more.
Leave your comment