Wednesday's Solarday

After what seemed like an interest in doing Solar plates turned out to be very different.  I went in earlier this morning to do a test plate, an image I put together in Photoshop about my recent dental bridge replacement and that may be the image for the Tension portfolio.  I tried one plate with an exposure of 35 seconds for the aquatint screen and 30 seconds for the transparency. It was over exposed, the teeth looked like big white boxes and the hand-written text was nonexistent.  I tried another plate and cut the exposure back to 30/25...still too much.  My time for experimenting was fading so I decided that for the in-class demo I would use a 25/30 exposure.

When we finally focused on the project of the day, only one person had an idea ready to roll.  So I went through the whole process, how to use the exposure unit, and exposed the plate to the aquatint screen and the transparency, developed/etched, and then proofed the plate. Everything showed up in the proof, but the dense blacks had light areas.  I had printed another transparency and layered it one on top of the other, and as Rob pointed out to me, the density of the layered blacks had blocked each other out thus producing an area that didn't have enough tooth to hold the ink.  That made all kinds of sense.  Good thinking , Rob.

I'm going to try combining the various over exposed plates into a separation image and see if there's anything there.  If not, I'll look for another alternative. Anthony has an image ready to go that's pretty nice, so I guess he'll attack that this weekend.  Everyone else got solar plates and we'll see what happens with them.  We'll look at collagraphs on Monday.

So, when do you want to do a print-a-thon?