Hi Everyone! I hope everyone is having a good last week of the semester and finals are going well! Last week in the printmaking room we got to experiment with a new type of etching print. This time, we did not actually carve/etch any lines into anything, instead we used more of a relief technique with litho crayons and sharpie marker on what’s called a pronto plate. A pronto plate is a specialized, non-toxic polyester plate used for simple lithographic printing that doesn’t require acids, solvents, or heavy stones. It allows for the ability to create prints by drawing directly on the surface with greasy materials like Sharpies or crayons, or you can use laser printers. Here is what my plate looked like:

For my experiment exercise with printing on these plates, I decided to draw a little turtle with some flowers around it. It was something cute and fun to draw and I had no idea how well it would come out. To my surprise, it looked fairly easy, but when I started rolling the ink on I had some issues. I drew the design in regular crayon, and it seemed to work fine. The technique for printing is that you have to get the plate wet so that the ink only sticks to the exposed, greasy substance you used to draw on top. Then you roll the ink on top with a brayer, and its very important that the type of ink is an oil-based ink so that it repels the water. For the first time inking it up, it seemed to work pretty good, although some of the ink was sticking to the edges of the paper where it must have not been fully wet. So then I went ahead and printed it because the ink stuck to the crayon and it came out pretty good! However, the second or third try I must have not had enough water and I accidentally went back over the ink when it wasn’t fully wet because then my entire plate was filled with ink marks. I decided to start over and wipe it all off with turpentine and that got most of the ink off. I also cut off some of the edges to make a more organic shape so that it also cut off the parts where the ink stuck too much. Then I retraced the drawing in sharpie, but then the ink was barely sticking to that when I tried the process again. Here are the few prints that I did get:

Overall this was a fun experiment and a good learning opportunity. I realized how important it is that the entire plate is wet when you put the ink on. At least I got a few prints out of it that I can use for some future collaging or some other craft! Thanks for reading, stay tuned for my next post about my final project! It’s a fun one!

Ella