Lo-Fi Printmaking - Kitchen Lithography

hi I'm Christina from Midway fine print makers and in this tutorial for midway print festival 2020 lockdown Edition I'm going to show you Kitchen mythography so this is a process that uses oil and water and how they separate as a way of keeping an image clear on a plane so it's that process that makes some areas on a plane able to be kept clean and others to be inked up with sticky ink so that's the underlying science behind it but it does feel a bit magical in the way it works it's known for being a bit erratic so if you don't get this working on your first go then please give it another go that's a very fast process and you might not get it right first time but it's quite quick turnaround so she'd be able to have another go straightaway afterwards so I've run through all the things you need this process works really nicely with tin foil and we use coca-cola in order to process the image when you use a oil-based ink but the images that you get from it they are quite faithful to a drawing so if you like drawing commit is just to keep quite good tone in a drawing in print so it's a nice one you're a fan of pencil work okay so I run through all the things that we need so like I saying coca-cola just the cheapest the cheapest one that you can grab hold of read Bentley to buy anything fancy for that we've got just some cheap vegetable oil that will probably be best if you pour it into another little reciprocal so you'll get your inky fingers over the kitchen wonderful you want some tinfoil and highly recommend is that you go for extra strong because you can use the budget one but you'll get annoyed by it kind of bonds more easily in it it's not as easy work to get a bit result from a stronger one this is for cleanup we're going to be using an oil-based ink so this is not sure if you can see that but LIFO relief ink from intaglio so it's completely oil-based and you need oil to clean the ups or spirits so if you've been using the water-based safe wash aqua wash from the previous tutorials that won't work with this process it has to be just oil-based because that water and oil repelling each other is a key part of this process but this tea is a nice orange oil cleaner like a natural cleaner so it's much kinder in your skin than something like white spirit would be so you can use that as a final wipe up some old magazines are useful just for keeping things clean we've got some kitchen roll quite a few bits of that is useful like nobody chop them up a bit so that you so much scissors and we need some paper when you're doing your design it's quite good to start off with something quite simple to begin with because otherwise you might if you don't get a result right away over your drawing would have gone to waste so get used to the process first say I just done some simple eyes and kind of little characters and you'll see this one it's on a textured paper and if that texture picks up on the paper or as if you'd use a smoother paper it's you get more of the detail of the drawing so I think oh it's very useful to have just some cloths these are bits of t-shirt material that I've chopped up so you'll need several bits new sponges as well if you'd like you'll need a rubber roller are quite like using the small ones for this you can just ink up a bit or easily all over the image with that somehow applying the pressure feels good with a small one I'd like one cover your table and the kind of paper that I'll be using is a very thin cartridge very smooth Southlake smooth it's if you've got just a printed paper so this one that's just regular 80 GS and this one's a bit thicker like a deluxe thicker printer paper so we can have a go and see how those work - then you'll need a little tray with some water in and I've got some more t-shirt material cloths there something to draw a myth so trying to graph pencils I love these I'll show you close up in a bit but they're very old-fashioned they've got kind of like a paper wrap around the minister rather than using a sharpener you can peel this these bits off and then life though crayons as well so these are very oily little square crayons that are made for this process you can get from a print maker suppliers these you can just get in ordinary stationery shops and sometimes places like wilcos so a little brush brushing off any extra bits of pencil marks on your plate something to burnish paper with some reviews wooden spoons in past for burnishing I like using this cow horn spoon but it wouldn't spend will do just as well and then we need a couple of plastic sheets so this is something I use a lot in the studio for lots of different things pallets for making them screen framers and things so you need one of these for rolling out your ink it could be a tile or a plate or even a glossy magazine and then you'll need one to go behind your tin foil to act as a support for you for your drawing and so something flat and waterproof it's a good idea in a pinch you could do that kind of fun thick card maybe abominated card so oh it's so masking tape just stretch out your tin foil that's everything I've got a pencil shot there so I can just shot in the very end of each other golf pencil that's it okay we'll also be using the sink to do the processing part with the coat so it's good to have a washing up Bowl and another thing too to scoop up the coca-cola and pour keep pouring over the over the plate when you're processing okay I think that's everything we need so we get you to come over close up and I'll show you do take this foil and first really important thing to know is you must not touch this any way that you want to transfer your principle image because the grease off of your fingers will make printable marks so you don't want to touch it so get it out of the packet carefully and don't touch it and just roll it out you're so trying not to crease it at all so we want a piece that's nice and flat now take my scissors it's as possible this one back in the box I tend not to use the tear off part of the box because it tends to crease things up more so I'm only touching this around the edges now I like these blue masking tapes painters tapes they're um just you can reuse bits of the tape and it just seems some really good tackiness to it a lot of jobs so I'm gonna take this piece and attach it to my plastic sheet at the top there so some people wrap it all the way around but I find it easier to work this way and it gives you quite a nice clean edge as well so now I'm going to use the one of the cloths just to smooth the tinfoil down you okay so it's key to be gentle with this the whole time so you try not to make too sudden moves and we're definitely not touching that with our greasy fingers okay there's a good thing to do the this point when you've got before you sort of get too far into it is to roll the ink out so it doesn't end up getting to mock you and your fingers later so I'm just going to get that bit done so that's again it's the life though intaglio nice I really think and I'm just gonna squeeze a bit at the top if I get any of this on my fingers I'll just use a bit of vegetable oil a bit of soap to rub it off you could wear gloves if you want to if you want to I have to keep washing your hands so that should be enough no get this out of the way that's and just roll this out so when you're rolling out the sink you want to get a pick up a little bit to begin with and spread it out and one of the key things of rolling out properly is that you keep lifting the roller up so that it doesn't just keep getting the same sort of wrap run so you don't see if you move it around it will spread the ink rather than just putting it in the same place all the time so I've just picked up a bit of the ink I haven't taken a whole lot and going backwards and forwards and trying to get this good and even so it shouldn't be hissing too much should just be making this soft soft noise I might need to pick up a bit later but that will do for now clean fingers right so this is where we can they'll stop doing our drawing so I've when I've put the tinfoil down I've had it so it's the less shiny side up I prefer drawing on that side okay got a hold of it there and then you just unravel it and it will expose some more of the nice crayon inside so yeah rather than wood it's got paper holding the whole thing together I'm just gonna quickly draw out a design and it's important to keep your fingers away from the anywhere on the tinfoil but also to draw quite strong marks so you want to go over them a little bit as well once you've sketched something out you can use carbon paper to transfer a design onto here as well I would generally go over it with the china graph pencil but some people have found success with just a carbon onto the into the tinfoil anyway so I sketched something out and then I'll show you which step to go next I would suggest doing a variety of marks with your first one so do something quite simple but maybe try out doing some lines and some really sketchy stuffs and some things like sort of dots some cross hatching bits just try out some different marks so you can see what becomes more reliable in the final results you not quite sure what my current obsession with sinister-looking vegetables is at the moment but I've been doing a lot of gardening since we've been shot at intra if you need to get further into their picture just use something else to need on CD and end up moving your handle to the plate big nor by an invoice of doing something simple but we'll see how this goes next step it's going to the sink and exposing this with some coca-cola so I've got my plate ready you've got my coke here I'm going to just pour some of that coke it's a little pot that I've got I've got some fresh I've already done this today so I've got some down in their bowl as well so you can't use up old stuff to begin with and I'm just gonna pop into this bowl and pour it all over the plate and you want to really make sure that it's going all over where the drawing is it's got a bit of a reaction between the the greasy marks Makayla you okay I think that's long enough so in the shake off as much as I can and then just give it a little bit of a wipe up with some kitchen towel to get all that wet coat off of there so I didn't get an awful lot on the back there so that's why you can get away with something that I could laminated cereal box or something too so uses your backing if you don't have a piece of plastic like this so once again I'm trying to be as gentle as possible it's very easy to make creases at this point so trying to avoid that as much as possible I'm just going to use a bit of vegetable oil it doesn't need loads start with that and just give the plate a good wipe just to remove that drawing and you should start to see actually that the the during is etched it will leave it the drawing will remain even though you've removed the the waxy crayon you'll be able to see the mark of it underneath as you clean it off not sure if you can see it from there but I'll do a close-up once I removed it all and try and get as much of this oil off here as soon as possible with them still being careful of the plate and making sure I don't get any creases extra creases in there very easily done so once I've wiped off as much as I can with the oily cloth get another clean cloth see if you can take a little bit more off so should look very dry at the time you've done that so let's see if you can catch a little glimpse of the image on there if we take a little bit of the water so squeeze out one of your cloths and just give it a gentle white poke the top and perhaps perhaps you can see the image is starting to appear now in the way that it's repelling the the water so it should the water should be kind of running away from those areas that the greasy drawing was underneath okay now I'm gonna start thinking up the greasy sauce you want to go quite carefully at this stage so coming in quite gently I want it to only go on the areas where the drawing was sometimes if it gets either too dry or if you have too much ink on the roller let's start to go everywhere so you can add more and more lots of different go so start off gently she's doing pretty well with most of those marks even the ones that quite quite pale so I'm gonna actually put a bit more filter on so in between you don't want the plate where the where the drawing isn't you don't want those bits to dry out so keep it wet your ink is oil-based so it won't smudge unless you press too hard so just go Jen over the top of it so if you find it's going onto the plate in places it shouldn't it's probably because the plate is too dry if the plate was completely dry then think just go over it no I just need to get its weight underneath there so this paper is going to have to be able to soak up a bit of that wet the water on the plate and but this is going to be good for the job we'll see whether the photocopy paper is up to the job in a minute because we can get several prints out of this so just laying it down at this point if you want to you can protect the back of the paper by putting a piece of scrap paper over the top but I'm just gonna finish straight onto this you can also use grease proof paper if you like you reuse grease of your paper quite nicely so just going all over where I know the drawing is I can see through it a little bit because this paper is quite thin say it's cartridge paper it's got a bit of body to it so it will be able to soak up that water without too much problem but it's quite nice and smooth so it's going to pick up the detail so without lifting completely up I'm just gonna have to look at how that's going and just see where I need to do a bit more burnishing if you feel sometimes with the paper if it's quite thin you can feel it getting a little bit stuck as the water's coming through the paper just coming through a little bit over there and it's or just catches on the spoon so that's where the grease food pay for so it would be quite handy see how I'm doing this end pretty good just a couple of little bits okay oh it moved just a little bit so it's slightly blurry so to see if I can do a little bit better on the next one okay so this paper is now damp and in order to dry it so that it's not crinkly when it's when it's dry you want to wrap it in a couple of pieces of tissue paper it's oil-based ink so it's not going to permanently stick to the tissue paper so wrap it in there and then put it underneath the heavy book and then it'll dry nice and flat move that one out another go so I'm going to ink up again you of those prints that I just made there was the cartridge it's a thin ordinary saw inkjet photo copier paper 80 GSM and then a more heavyweight one I think 120 gsm have you weight inkjet paper and that one came out really beautifully actually really nice results one that will definitely carry on dudes and prints with that this one didn't work out so well I think it's because then I had to put another piece of paper over the back of it when I was burnishing it because the water really does come immediately through so that's a bit too thin for my liking but you can see that the print you know what will be done there about five prints here and it's still holding up really nicely so I could easily get another good 10 or more out of this but what I'll show you is how to clean up the plate and also win-win that's drawing it out so this will have dried a little bit if you if you've just forgotten to add a bit of water in between inking up and you find that it inside kind of sticking a bit you can just get a bit of water on there and it will still rich worked okay um okay so if we want to take this off and we're used to oil again you so bad can you just sit on there and if I want to I could still use it so I've just taken it down like we did originally when we cleaned the image off setting it down to cleaned with oil if I wanted to start again I'll come back to this it's still gonna do that same process so take this off so you can use the oil to clean up your plate as well so if you've got any leftover ink you might want to scrape that into a little pot two years later anything that you don't want to use you can get that magazine and just scrape off you can scrape off the worst of the ink and then just get in there with the vegetable oil and it's the same for the role is really to get rid of that quite often I will just go like this on a page for the worst of it or must think about the magazine you with my zest it if you haven't got this or any other cleaner you don't have to do it you won't harm your roller it's just to get it that just a little extra bit clean thanks for watching this tutorial I hope it's inspired you to have a go at this printmaking technique and if you do we'd really love to see your prints so please share them use the festival hashtag and we'll put that at the end of the video and I list all of the things that we've used in this tutorial and if you've got any questions please post them and I'll see if I can answer them thanks a lot happy printing you

Channel: Medway Fine Printmakers

Views: 12,284

Keywords: Kitchen litho, kitchen lithography, printmaking, print processes, lithography, mpf20lockdown, medway print festival, medway fine printmakers, Rochester Kent, printmaking at home, lockdown printmaking, kitchen printmaking, diy printmaking, printmaking without a press, litho without a press, lo-fi printmaking

Id: RK2wng6wUbw

Length: 30min 18sec (1818 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 09 2020