Hi all! :)

How are you this very fine Friday?

To be honest I'm pretty tired myself after a week full of work and appointments, in other words, I welcome the weekend with open arms!

Today I want to share with you a very recent print of mine though and talk a bit about the process.

By the way, I am still trying to figure out a name for this one, I would very much like it to be something a bit more original than my first idea, ''Mermaid''...

Drypoint printed on Velin Johannot 240 g. paper With the chine- colle technique.

So some of you might remember me talking about this technique called chine-colle, and to most of you this probably is something you have never heard of. Well, to I'm going to try and explain the process as clearly and simply as possible.

Chine-colle is when you print your engraved/etched plate with a thin colored or non colored paper through the press to create another layer to your print.

My favorite paper to work with is something called Japanese paper and I know a lot of people love rice paper as well.
I loke to hand color my papers with water and Indian ink. What I do is have bowls of water which I add the different colors of ink I'd like, then I put down a plastic sheet which I cover with the ink -water with the help of brushes. When I have an area as big a my paper covered with the mixture I simply Place the paper on the mix and it soaks up all the different colors.

bowl of ink and water.. I love how the ink looks just after it hits the water...

Japanese paper soaking up the ink and water..

After I have the colors the way I like, I put the paper down flat on some newspaper and wait for it to dry.

The Next step is ofcourse to have a plate ready that you want to print with your Japanese paper. I had been working on this mermaid plate in plexiglas for a while and know that I would be using this particular plate, hence the watery colors in green and blue on my colored paper.

The technique I used on my plate is a simple drypoint techinque. You use a tool which looks like a pen but instead of the tip being ink, its a nail/ needel like sharp tip. You use this tip to engrave/ skratch into your plate. You can aslo use cobber and zink, which I do prefer myself, but I wanted to give plexiglas a try as it is much cheaper and you can take advantage of the fact that it is seethrough so you can place your sketch under the plate and copy it quite easily.

My plexiglas plate inked up..

I wanted to use a mixture of greens and blues for this print, here are my mixes;

And here is what the plate looks like right after I have applied the ink.

I use wine corks to apply the ink and then tarlatain, chees cloth fabirc, to remove the eccess ink. When the plate is ready to print it looks like this;

Now the steps are as follows;

• Dampen your colored Japanese/rice paper, just make it damp, not wet! This is important. Excess water can be removed by pressing the paper inbetween newspaper.

-Put the paper flat spray a spraycan glue to get a thin, even layer on the whole paper. Remember to spray the side of the paper that you don't want to show in the final print.

• Put your plate on the printing press.

• Put your sprayed paper with the sprayed side UP ontop of your plate.

• Take your dampened normal printing paper ( I use Velin Johannot, but any will do as long as its thicker than 200 g.) And put it ontop of your plate andsprayed paper.

• Final step, run it through the press!

Print vs Plate.

And there you have the finished print!

It's a lot of fun and I really enjoy fitting the paper to the print with different textures and colors in mind. Like for example with this one I was thinking water and tranquillity..

What do you think?

I hope you all have a wonderful and creative weekend <3