4 Color Test Print

These last few days I've been working on a new test print. I mentioned before that I'm enrolled in a few painting classes and for our new assignment we have to do a painting "in the style of an old master." Again I talked with my teacher to see if it would be okay to do a print with oil painting integrated into it. Again she agreed. Yessss! (Painting is okay, but I love printmaking more...) 

So the artist I chose to do my print/painting from is Gustav Klimt. I really like how most of his image is flat and a lot of implied textures with shapes but then the figure's face and arms are rendered more life like. So I wanted to create a piece that was similar to his style but as a print. 

The other thing I wanted to try this time was using multiple matrices (the sintra I carve my image into) and print it in a similar way a inkjet printer would. In simpler terms, an inkjet printer has 4 colors inside it; Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, and Black and when those colors overlap on top of each other you get the other various colors like your greens and purples and oranges. That is what I wanted to do with this text print, but manually. 

I have never done a multiple print like this before so instead of just diving head first into a large piece I decided to do a smaller text print first to try it out. So that's what you're looking at now. 

After carving each matrix (4 in total) for a few days I got ready to test it out. 

Here is the yellow print coming off the press.

When doing a multi-colored print, I always print the lighter color to the darker color.

Then I printed the red ink on top of the yellow. Now you can start to see that the yellow coming threw the red makes it look more like an orange color.

Now for the blue.

Now its really starting to stand out. I planned it so the figure would be more yellow/orange and the back ground would be blue/purple to give it contrast.

Then lastly I added black to accent certain parts. Over all the image looks great (well I think so, it turned out how I wanted it to) and I really like the secondary colors that were created by the overlapping primary colors.

And there is my finished piece. I made an edition of 8. 

You can seen where I ink up my matrices and each of the colored inks.

Like I mentioned this was just a test print to see if I could get this process to work before I tackled a larger print. Now that it has, I will start carving my actual piece to show in my painting class.