Lithography

 

Next is Lithography. I really felt passionate about the insitutional abuse theme that developed while working on the photography project. The one image that really made me want to work more on is the photo of the confessional box with the disturbed curtain. I decided to work on this actual image for the litho stone.

 

 

 

The process of working with litho stones is very long, but it's a change of pace to etching which is not a bad thing!! I really enjoyed it. I'll only briefly explain what I did (there are 22 steps for preparing the stone alone!!). I had to check that the stone was level as this would affect the printing of my final image. Next I ground the stone using various grades of carborundum (coarse, medium and fine) three times with each, extra emphasis on where the stone was higher. Once ground and flat I then allowed the stone to dry and filed the edges. I recorded the size of my stone, intended image and boarder needed. I put gum Arabic on the boarder area, and allowed it to dry. Then I started drawing my image:

This is from my sketchbook

 

This is it on the litho stone. It's reversed so when I print it it'll print as in my sketchbook (I hope!)

 

It's currently etching at the moment and will be printing later this week or next week hopefully. There's a queue for the presses. Gotta wait my turn... I'll update as soon as I have prints to show.

 

In the meantime I started playing around with ideas on some photocopies I made.

 

 Here I placed some tracing paper over the confessional box and wrote out words that came to mind while actually looking at it.

 

Later I then decided to go a step further....... I made a minature confessional box out of a cardboard box.

 

 As you open the doors on the confessional box, you can see text written on the back wall - thoughts of mine about what the confessional would represent. I also placed sweet wrappers on the floor - representing temptation / reward. How does it make you feel? What words come to your mind when you look at this?