Portrait of Girl with Hair Clips 1950’s Style

Above is the drawing I drew that inspired the mask for Printing. I much prefer this design to the previous design using leaves. But as I tried to Print with this Mark it became clear there were difficulties with such a delicate/small mask.

Below is a trial version of a Print using Tissue Paper underneath the mask. I really liked the way this worked, and the boldness of the bright pink colour. So i thought I’d give creating ink in a similar colour a go…

Portrait Mask with Pink Tissue Paper

Bright Pink Ink on Inking Plate

However in Practice the Pink on the Inking Plate did not lead to vivid Pink prints. The prints turned out a slightly different looking shade of red first time round.

Another problem arose in that not all the ink in the negative space transferred onto the paper for the print. As you can see the first few prints weren’t very strong, there’s a large amount of the original design’s detail missing.

First Prints

First Prints Part two

I do however like the border around the print in the middle of the photo above. I know that’s not what was recommended but It nicely frames the portrait.

Wanting to improve on the first round of prints I tried a second time with a second mask that I’d prepared, unfortunately the results were no better, which got me back to the drawing board (so to speak).

I wondered if the issue was the negative space was too small, and if I enlarged this (and the overall image) the print might come out at a better quality. So I drew a slightly different large design based on the original to make new masks from.

Larger Design

I’ll talk about how those turned out tomorrow.