My favorite artist is a man named Albrecht Durer. He was a German painter and printmaker. What I love about Albrecht Durer was the seemingly endless detail in his prints and his ability to capture the personality of his subjects in his portrait painting. He was also know for his great curiosity and love of travel.
I decided to take up printmaking because of my background with graphic design. I wanted to model one of my prints after a piece of art by Albrecht Durer. However, I knew my approach to making the print would have to be very different. Albrecht Durer was a perfectionist and almost fanatical about detail. I, on the other hand, am relatively new to printmaking. I wanted to focus more on the image and getting acquainted with the materials. I chose to create a large image on a rough piece of board to prevent myself from being too overly concerned with detail.
I modeled this piece after Albrecht Durer's engraving Nemeis.
I was very pleased with the way this print came out. I love the textures and patterns I was able to get, especially in the background. It ended up have a very expressive feel because the wood grain pattern was so erratic. Because I was so happy with the way this came out, I found ways to keep taking it further.
The color in this print was achieved through chine-colle. Chine-colle is a method where colored paper is added to the main piece of paper before it is printed.
As a nod to my graphic design background I continued the chine-colle series based on the CMYK color model.
I also ended up taking the cut-outs from the previous prints and used them to create this image.
Curious about Chine-Colle process. Is paper just glued on top? How is figure kept white?
ReplyDeleteFor the pieces with the color background I would trace out the image on colored paper. I would cut out the part of the sky that I wanted to use. I would then put glue on the back of it so that it would pick up the ink on one side and become attached to the white piece of paper on the other side when I ran it through the press. (The figure remained white because it was actually a hole in the colored piece of paper.)
ReplyDeleteI ended up printing a completely blue, yellow, and magenta version of each one but I decided to cut the figure out and make a collage of the three, which is how I got the last piece.