Procurement

So I've gotten my plates from BoxcarPress, picked up some Pictorico OHP from an undergrad student who was ditching a brand new box of 8.5x11 for $20 (a pretty good price considering I didn't have to pay $13 for shipping and no tax...), and now I'm ordering my aquatint screen from Dan Welden.

I have several good papers at home, I think they'll work well for the gravures. I'm considering using some special ink and trying a bunch of different papers later on, but first I just need to get the plate-making down.

The practitioners of the 'solar-plate' or 'polymer-gravure' use two different techniques on how to create the plate.

The first is to create the negative as a smooth continous grey-scale image, and then to double-expose the plate. You expose first with the aquatint screen (80% grey), then you remove the screen and expose with the negative (actually, a positive...).

The other idea is to print your negative digitally and have embedded in the image the actual random dot pattern or a 'dither' into your image. I tried this way two summers ago in Rexburg, printing out the digital negative as a bitmap file. Although the gravures that other students did looked pretty good, I knew it could be better.

I found Susan Voss' site and learned how she was doing the double-exposure tecnique and have decided to not even bother with the bitmap dither at all. My feeling is that you lose the gentle grey-scale-ness of the print, and that it ends up looking too 'digital'. With the Stochastic screen printing, the prints are more luminous, have a much more gentle greyscale transition, and look like the gravures I'm trying to emulate from the old masters (Curtis, Steichen, Steiglitz, etc...).

I saw a wonderful demonstration on solarplate at the Alternative Photography International Symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico several years ago. I do remember the wash-it-in-water nature of his process, and the polymer-gravure name of the plates he was making. I think his name is David Hoptman...the workshop presentation/demo is listed in his CV.

I also remember how beautiful they looked, and it has stuck in my head all this time. Hopefully I can get a good start towards making some good prints. I know it can be done, it's just a matter of me learning how I can do it.

I need to get going on this because I'm quickly running out of time in the semester. Approx. 3-weeks left. EEEK!