afsart: digital relief prints

afsart: digital relief prints
Originally uploaded by afsart

This posting is dedicated to my high school art teacher Bernard Rattiner who introduced me to the joy of printmaking and made it my first artistic love.

Over the winter break I have been exploring relief printing using laser engraved plates. Through a series of experiments I have come up with some techniques and applications that are beginning to yield some very good results.

While the texture of the wooden plates yield some very nice effects I have a little more work to do on both the pressure and the inking in order to get the quality that I want.

When preparing the wooden plates there is a lot of work that needed to get the laser setting right in order to avoid burning your plate when you have very dense lines. After some trial and effort or I should say charr and error, I have got those settings dialed in. These settings will come in handy when I am creating wood burnings as an end unto themselves.

Acrylic plates seem to be the way to go to get rich color and excellent line quality. Additionally there is the added benefit of being able to use the same plates for Intaglio processes. My colleague Prof. Steven Ramsey has turned me onto a real cool application for combining both of these processes on the same plate.

I am currently working on a new series of plates. Once I have them printed I will devote a posting that deals more specifically with the content of the work and the digital processes that I use to create them.