Printing a Collagraph with Full Color Using a la Poupee

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Print a Collagraph Using a la Poupee for Full Color

This is a mat board collagraph (also known as press board or mont board), printed in full color in one pass through the press. If you’ve never used the a la poupee method of inking your plate, I hope you’ll give it a go.

Here is another collagraph printmaking post, with details on full color printing via a la poupee (over here)

Draw First

I start every collagraph print with a pencil drawing on the back of a sheet of mat board. Shade in the areas you’re planning to print dark, as a reminder to clear a space for ink to settle inside those shapes.

If you’re looking for rich darks to remain in place on the print, even after wiping the plate, consider using a little carborundum in those areas. (There’s more about carborundum in a post from earlier this week over here.)

After drawing and shading in pencil, the entire plate gets sealed with a single coat of gloss medium front, back and edges, twice. This helps to prevent tearing when you’re cutting into the uppermost surface, and peeling shapes away.

Pets in the Printmaking

After a few decades of living with cats, I’ve slipper-shuffled into my early morning kitchen, headed for the coffee pot, and encountered this view many times.

The current early morning obstacle course is just one cat. Scout will paw-box the backs of our legs if we walk away from his empty bowl to get coffee first. In our previous chapters, there were four of them – all hollerin’ as though starvation set in over night.

Collagraph Print Ideas

There are plenty of ideas for collagraph prints around your feet, where you sit, and in the environments around your home. This post has some tips for locating compositions for art-making using the view-finder on your cell phone. And this post has more details on printing collagraphs in both relief and intaglio methods.

What are your plans? Collagraphs made from images of landscapes, portraits, still life or abstract?

I hope you make something soon. Thanks for stopping by, and I’ll see you in the next post –

Belinda

P.S. If you love a good How-To book, this book on Making Collagraph Prints by Suzie MacKenzie is full of detailed, photographed tips and tricks from her studio, as well as examples of collagraphs from printmakers around the world.

Art Quote

I went up there the day of her funeral [Christina died in 1969].  It was snowing. I happened to look into this kitchen. It had snowed hard during the night, and the snow had sifted in the cracks and chinks of the door so that there was a thin line of white snow right across the floor right up over her chair and down. It was icy white, almost like a finger pointing. Damnedest thing. God, the way the snow had sifted, very much how grain will sift through the finest sliver or opening. It was like lightening coming across the chair. I was wandering around and I looked into this dark room from the window and at the same time I could hear them using a jackhammer to dig the grave down there because the ground was so frozen, and I was shocked by that line of snow.

Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth – Thomas Hoving

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