For this week’s printing class we did dry point printing. This is where I scratched my design onto metal and used a printing press to transfer the print onto the paper. As a lot of my prints have been in, what I aimed to be, positive colours, I’ve used a mixture of of red and yellow, as red is a negative colour in my opinion. For my design I’ve done a more detailed version of my sunflower with crosshatching marks to show tone. I also have added the symbol used for biohazard objects around the edges. I purposely left slightly more ink around the edges to cover these marks, to make them invisible to the viewer until you move closer to the paper. This is part of my conceptual idea to do with how the concept changes to the viewer from different distances; for example the idea of the sunflower representing happiness and optimism holding the theme of the piece, and paralleled with life and the threat of the health of living organisms as a more negative aspect of my theme. The aim of this technique is to get the viewer to think about whether nature as we see it is a positive or negative thing, or both.
For these prints, I wanted to layer what I consider positive and negative colours to create a sense of double vision, almost, of how we as people perceive nature. The reason I didn’t line up the plates exactly is because it symbolises the imperfections in both man kind and nature (although I consider mankind to be a part of nature itself).
For my next prints, I need to work on aligning the paper onto the plate before it goes into the printing press, and avoid getting any finger prints on the edges, to give my prints a more professional look.
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