So, it's just a water proofing technique and don’t get it too thick. You want to make sure it's spread out nice and thin because if you get too thick, the print making process will actually pick up the brush strokes and it means it's going to pick up some of your brush strokes anyway but which is kind of neat actually. So, I’m just going to make sure I go over the puppy dog and down here a little bit. Let’s move it out real good. Oh, our hot glue, I can feel it, and that’s a good thing. You want to put that too. And now, I’m just going to let this dry because it has to be really, really dry before we go ahead and do our printing.
So, at this point, if they don’t want to stop, find a safe place for your printing plate to dry and we can come back to it and maybe an hour or so. So, there we have it.
I’m back with a dry printing plate, and I’m now going to show you how to ink up your plate and to pull a print. So, what you’re going to need is some paper on a clean area and you’re going to lay your printing plate on top of that little area. You need your ink. You need your flat plate to roll out on, and you really could use like a baking sheet as long as it's really flat. If you don’t have a piece of plastic glass or a piece of glass laying around the house that nobody is using. You’re going to need your water base ink so then it's easy to clean up. And what you want to do is you’re going to squirt out about as much as you would put on your toothbrush. Not too much because if you get too much ink, it's very difficult to get it to the consistency. We need to have it so that you don’t over ink your plate. You can always add more ink but it's hard to take it away.
Okay, so all I’m going to do is I’m going roll out my ink. Now, I happened to be kind of lucky here. There is a certain consistency which is just about now that you want your ink to be. You want to have all these tiny little texture here on your plate. Now, I’m going to start to ink this and you want to roll from the outside edges towards the center. The reason why is that often times people start in the center and they just keep working from the center out this way and they forget about the edges. And then when they go to hold their print, the edges are really fuzzy and the center is nice and dark. We want to get a nice, clear, clean print.
You don’t want to see your roller marks and then you want to take this sheet of paper here that has ink around the edges and flip it over because now you want a clean surface on which to place the plate. Now, let's go ahead and I’m going to pick pink and you want to kind of eyeball it. Now, once you lay this paper down, that’s it. You can t move it. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with the double print, so you get it centered over the plate and then gently drop it onto the plate.
Start in the center, with one hand flat. You’re going to hold it and with this part of your fingers in circular motions, you’re going to rub making your way across the entire surface of the printing block. And you don’t want to forget those edges because you want a nice crisp edge. You want to able to see where the print begins and where it ends and I’m pressing pretty hard here. I’m putting some power behind this because I want this first one to be nice and dark. And you want to try really hard not to accidently drag your paper across the printing plate.
Now, I’m going to do what I call the little sneak peak then I’ll hold down my print with one hand. And I’m going to take a little peak and see if there’s any spots that maybe I could rub a little bit more like his paws and right around the flowers. And I’m going to keep my hand here. I’m going to pull back a little bit and I think I can press more around the flowers and the rest of it looks pretty good but just to be on the safe side. I’m going to give it one last rub. Make sure I’ve got all around his face. Because once you pulled it off, you can put it back down and do it again.
Okay, so here, we go and here is our print of our little doggy. The only thing that didn’t come out as well I would have hope was his tongue but with the second print as you add more ink in here, you’ll get a better print the second time around. The fun part about printmaking is that you can do multiple images. Once you’ve spend all this time on the creating the printing plate, then you can make as many copies as you want. You can give one to mom, you can give one to dad for his office, you can give one to your older brother or sister, one to your best friend, one to grandma, grandpa and just you know on and on for presents, birthday parties or whatever. There’s nothing nicer than a piece of original art work that somebody has made for someone else.
So, let's assume that I’ve made as many prints as I want. Remember I told you that I was going to show you a way to preserve this project, this printing plate and actually make another art project out of it. Now, some people just let the ink dry on the plate and they actually keep the printing plate. You could do that if you wanted to or you could wipe it off with the dumped sponged and then dry it real quick and keep it and reuse it over and over again to make more prints as you want to or you can do something a little bit different here. While the ink is still wet, I’m going to take as piece of aluminum foil. I’m starting in the center. I’m going to work my way out to the outer edges, and I’m going to rub so that you can see and even those little brush strokes, these little brushes of polymer that I’ve put down on the ground are showing through. And actually, if you look really closely, right here that real fine line, that’s actually a spider web left over from the hot glue gun that I didn’t pull off. I forgot to pull that off.
Now, the tongue’s coming through better and here comes the tree and the clouds and the doghouse. And now, we’re going to turn it over and then I’m going to cut away this excess foil here. And I’m going to wrap this as if it were a package and turn in the corners in an angle, turn in that corner. Fold this over and do the same thing on this end, fold this in as a triangle and fold it. And then if you have some masking tape which I don’t seem to have, you can go ahead and tape it down later but it's going to stay there because it's going to dry stuck to the printing ink that’s underneath there. And then here you’ve got two versions of the same project.
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