Printmaking at Art School Waihi

Mondays at Art School Waihi are reserved for print making and other entertainments and above is my friend Barbi jubilant after success on number four of her Salvador Dali moon prints.
It is a dry point on perspex print. It is nice for me to have friends coming on Monday so that I must put down all the urgent other stuff and do art myself. Sandra, Bill Barbi and me are going to keep it up, continue to make the time to devote Monday to our real job...

Waihi Printmaking Class

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

Creative Waihi hired me to run a printmaking class for beginners.
Two hours a week for 6 weeks.
If you know anything about printmaking you will know that that is an almost impossibly short time to have 13 total beginners each produce a pleasing print at the end of but all went well and the class was a success.
To begin with I was teacher and we went through preparing the plates, applying the grounds and transferring the various designs and etching the plates in acid.
Then came the first printing and we discovered that all the plates were overbitten and not printing well because of my underestimation of the strength of the acid and the time the plates should spend in the acid.
Week 4 I softened the ink with plate oil, introduced best quality printmaking paper, increased the press pressure to the max and encouraged the students to leave some plate colour so as not to wipe off too much ink.
These measures worked and reasonable results were achieved.
Week 5 and 6 they all went crazy!
My expensive paper was vanishing at an alarming rate, they were tearing into all the coloured ink and making their own colours, queueing at the press, not listening to me, not going home at home time but working on and on. Ink and mess all over the place. Like kids in a toy shop on a sugar and colouring rush. The energy was amazing, the time flew by, as no one was listening to me I had to teach by example and inked a few plates in unusual ways and introduced texture effects and was constantly interrupted by pleas, demands and questions so my head was spinning. It was an amazing experience and we got some great results and many printmaking techniques explored and many interesting and elusive effects changing a simple and pleasant design into something much more.
The poor things are now all addicted to printmaking.
My God! What have I done!!

Print making studio

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

This mangle from which I made a printing press came from my families farm and has been in the family for at least 90 years. It's got to be my most beautiful toy. The zinc and copper plates stacked on the wood shelf under the press bed and adjacent to all that cast iron and steel framing must, in my imagination, have an electrolysis effect and thus the press has life. Haven't given it a name but it has a phoenix embossed on it's two sides. Lovely.

One thing left to do in the printmaking end of the studio is build a fume extraction box for the acid bath and then print making courses can begin.

Print making attractions

Etching Press Sale Enquiries: johnnymulvay@vodafone.co.nz

Corrosive and lethal fluids, just the smell of some of these puppies does serious damage

Exotic and antique crystals, powders and resins along with filthy black sticky substances and nasty smelling solvents, both antique and modern

Metals! Copper, Zinc, Aluminium, Steel, Old cast iron and wood machinery designed to exert tons of pressure through thick felt pads.
And after all the careful and time-consuming effort working with things dangerous and dirty and when ones hands are filthy and smelly the exciting part involving damp highest quality hand made papers must have clean hands, very clean hands and just when you are raring to go and get a result you must stop and get clean and calm and together for the actual printing.
I don't know why exactly but Women seem to love this work, it seems like such a guy thing, filled as it is with dirt, danger and techo chemical processes and vile fumes and sticky filth but lifting the print off the plate at the end is like a birth and the new baby is always, in some way, unexpectedly beautiful.
Today I plan to have the printmaking part of the studio finished and ready to roll. Yay!