House Project part 10

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the presentation of this piece for the upcoming Gimme Shelter show in Belmar. I'm leaning toward presenting the print mounted on a piece of similarly shaped wood- that will allow me to add the intended color, avoid the issues of a five sided artwork in a four sided frame, and give it a similar presence to what most people will submit for the show. The big question is how to get it to stick to the base without damaging the paper or the watercolor paint. I have a few ideas, but I think it would be safest to test a few procedures before committing one of the two proofs that I have available.

So with that in mind, I decided to make a few testable pieces. I stopped by the Studio very briefly this afternoon, picking up my traveling printmaking kit (a bag of brayers, wooden spoons, etc), along with an almost empty can of oil based ink, and a few decent sized scraps of the same okawara I printed on yesterday. I don't want to re-ink the house block at this point, so I grabbed a block from a few years ago to make my test pieces. The rest of what I needed was already at home.

In the evening I took care of the first step. I could have used a glass palette (how I usually roll out my ink for my prints, and for student work as well), but that's one more thing to clean, so I went with an empty cereal box instead. I usually have a lot of them piled up (use them with my classes), the size is good for this purpose, and the coated cardboard exterior will resist the ink long enough for a quick job like this.

I rolled ink onto a couple of sections of the small block, then printed these sections on two scraps of okawara. The previous coat of ink on the block from the original printing made the job easy.

The pieces of printed paper should be dry enough to color in a few days. (brought home a small bag of watercolors for this purpose) I'll try some of my mounting ideas, and if one works, color the new print and get it ready for this weekend.