Hello all. I was slowed down this morning by a publishing glitch, but hope I am back in business now. Thanks for the feedback on the launch of the Garden, its great to hear from all of you. In fact, Meg's comment about skating inspired today's theme.
With this print, I was trying to evoke the ice skates of my youth. White, high-button-boot-looking hand-me-downs. I think we had skates of various sizes in the attic, and we'd just work our way up the sizes as we grew. I am the youngest sibling in my family (and the youngest cousin), and my skates were floppy and creased with use by the time I got to them. (In fact, some of them probably belonged to Meg at some point in their history.)
I read that you could use sculpey (or fimo -- a plastic modeling material) to make prints, so I decided to give it a try. I ended up making two prints, one with baked sculpey, and one with unbaked, still-malleable sculpey. This patty of sculpey is about half a centimeter thick. I added a little texture with the sandpaper and the crinkly plastic wrapper, hoping the crinkles would suggest the creases of broken-in skates. If I were doing this again, I would probably skip that step for the baked sculpey. It made the surface uneven and harder to pull a print from.
This is a two-color reduction print. Here is the block after the first carving, and the first color printed. I continued carving the block before printing the second color (that's the "reduction" part). The completed print is pictured at the top of the post.
Next up in the test kitchen: unbaked sculpey. Now this was fun. After rolling out another little patty, I cheated a little and poked holes through a photo of the little skater to sort of make a dotted line around the figure. Then I went back in with a pointy implement and drew the lines freehand, just indenting the "clay" with the point. I added the pebbly texture to the sweater with sandpaper (see final print below).
To sum up, while the baked sculpey did carve well, with my venerable speedball linocut tools, it required a lot of rubbing to get a decent print, and it was very picky about what kind of paper was used. On the plus side, I ended up with a nice little artifact in the end, my baked printing block with a skate carved on it. Heck, I could poke a hole through it, throw some paint on there, and I've got myself an ornament!
I think the soft sculpey printing concept has lots of potential for fun and experimentation, and yields cool effects that kids could acheive just by trial and accident: adding textures, pressing it with cookie cutters, etc. Its quite easy to get a nice print from the surface (although the printing process will deform your "block" to some degree). And though I used water-based block printing ink, other kinds of paints would probably work too. You could probably use this concept with other types of doughs or clays, especially plasticky ones like plasticene. You can even rinse the ink off, ball it up, and start over. I've got some other ideas in mind for this stuff, but I don't want to blow my whole wad on the second day! Its a marathon, people, not a sprint.
If you try some variation on this technique yourself, the test kitchen wants to know how it comes out. Play dough? Model Magic? Finger paint? Let's hear it.
