A Collagraph Workshop with Marty Vreede

It w as a very exciting weekend creating a collagraph “plate” with cardstock weight paper and learning how to print this with a mdf inked plate. I was fortunate enough to be able to do this at the Waikato Art School print room with the use of an etching press but I am really hopeful that this process will work with the second hand jump press I recently acquired.

The secret lies in creating a collagraph plate layered with the cardstock. We had a mandate to work on birds and I chose a kingfisher/kotare. Most people chose to work on a single bird but I chose to do two kotare facing each other with stylised lines representing the rivers they are often found around connecting the birds.

You don’t even have to know how to draw as you can trace the basic shapes for your composition without fear of infringing copyright.

We inked up the mdf ink plate and the collagraph plate, paper and mds were sandwiched before being fed through to etching press.

We learnt how to make as fricket to register subsequent prints. The initial prints were black and I ran two prints of ghost prints through and then flipped the collograph plate in reverse and ran through again so that the light print increased the complexit.y of the end result.

Then I tried a colour combo - yellow first and then cyan with a magenta overprint with the collagraph plate reversed. The inked mdf was run through the press with a sheet of newsprint initially to remove excess ink before the actual print was printed. I learnt so much from the easy bits of using talcum powder on the glued pieces of the collagraph to remove any excess glue from the glue stick through to thinking about the layering and how each layer would affect the finished print.

When we had all completed our initial prints we printed our plates on tissue paper to be displayed at the Waiprint exhibition in the Blue room in Hamilton. I am hoping to get up there to see them in situ.

Now I need to find some time to play with this technique on mulberry paper and silk organza and rice paper. Watch this space for those results

The photos above show my original inspiration, the yellow/cyan/magenta print and the original run through print to reduce the amount of ink on the first plate