A while ago I created a very successful deeply etched solar plate image which was exhibited in April.

Last month two friends and I were keen to explore viscosity printing again and as I don’t have much in the way of deeply bitten plates, which is what is required, I picked this one to experiment with again.

The idea, essentially, is to combine intaglio printing with relief printing to create multi-layered and multi-coloured imagery. It works like this:

• The process is shown to best effect using a multi-layered plate: either a metal plate or a solar plate etching with shallow, mid and deeply etched/bitten areas.
• Colour 1: Apply intaglio ink to the deepest sections as normal (i.e. push ink into the deepest recesses and remove it from the higher and top surface).
• Colour 2: Apply relief ink with a very low viscosity (i.e. thinned with a lot of oil so it flows easily and creates a fine layer of ink) using a hard roller. This ensures only a fine layer of colour is deposited and only to the very highest points of the plate – usually the parts that haven’t been etched at all.
• Colour 3: Apply relief ink with a high viscosity (i.e. ink with little or no additional oil added, so it remains denser when rolling out) using a soft roller. Apply some pressure when rolling over the surface of the plate so it reaches the mid-depth etched areas.

Because Colour 2 has a very high oil content it will reject Colour 3 as it is rolled over the surface and Colour 3 will only be deposited in the mid-depth sections of the plate.

So the composition of the plate and ink deposit will be: Colour 1 in the very deepest etched areas, Colour 3 in the mid to shallow etched areas and Colour 2 on the very surface where there is no etching.

In these pieces black was used as the intaglio ink, pushed into the most deeply etched parts of the plate. A very oily light blue was used as the second layer, lightly rolled over the surface with a hard roller, only touching the very top non-etched surfaces. A high viscosity off-yellow was applied as the third layer using a soft roller.

By applying some pressure the roller presses into the mid level surfaces and deposits the colour. This plate has a large heavily bitten area, the large white section, where the black ink was wiped away and by pressing with this soft roller it was able to reach into that area and leave some yellow. A quite different effect from the first image at the top of this post.

In the piece above you can see that I applied even more pressure to the soft roller with the yellow ink and managed to leave more ink than the previous print. However, I notice by doing this I’ve created a slightly smudged effect which is very evident towards the top left section.

Overall it is starting to look like a heavy dense image. My preference is for a lighter look and I still enjoy the original framed version.

The huge roller had sufficient ink transfer to it for it to be worth rolling onto proofing paper.

Click here to see the process that led to the framed print I created last year.