Project: Fighting Entropy

This stage looks at overprinting the coloured tissue backgrounds with one or more of the etching plates.

Many years ago, using gouache, I painted multiple ranges of colour swatches. I initially selected the three primary colours in warm and cool tones. These were incrementally mixed to show a progression across (around, I suppose) the colour wheel. Later, further swatches were produced using secondary and tertiary colours as well as explorations in shading, tinting and adjusting colour saturation. Although my work is mostly conducted using oil-based printing inks these days the basis is the same and these colour swatches have remained an invaluable tool in my selections for specific projects.

As previously stated Fighting Entropy is designed to encompass as much of the colour wheel as possible, with some variations in colour strength and tone. Below is the colour range, chosen from my swatches, I selected as my start point for the monoprinted pieces.

It’s now that the reason for printing the initial etchings onto tissue paper becomes clear, and extremely useful, as they can be laid across the surface of any of the coloured pieces to see what the overprinted effect will be. Where I have a strong etching on thicker paper the monoprint can be overlaid instead. Either way works to give an indication of how a combined print might appear.

Below is a progress shot as some of the pieces are worked on.

Once the printing is complete the individual pieces are combined into a book format. That will be shown in my next post.