Making a colloblock print: Samoan Skin

Video transcript (5:24)

In the studio with master printmaker, Paul Smith, and assistant, artist Dimitri Lihachov.

Paul Smith:

(Paul in front of his print, Samoan Skin, and the cloth that inspired it.)

Hi. My name is Paul Smith. I am Director of eStudio Editions.

This is a print of one of my own artworks. It was made from a cloth that we found when we were in Samoa last year. I was fascinated by the patterns and the way the light fell on the cloth.

From that cloth I made a drawing. And then from that drawing I drew onto a plate. The plates that I print on are wooden plates. They’re MDF boards, and then we coat the plates, the surface of the plate with the water based binder medium. It’s a wood block, basically, and it’s made up of 3 plates.

(Paul shows first yellow plate)

This is the first plate, which is the yellow plate, which you can see in the background here.

(Paul shows second red plate)

The second plate is the red plate, which is the pattern, the pattern that you see on that image. And, making a drawing from that cloth, and drawing it with pencil onto this plate, then we carve using traditional carving tools. We carved all the negative areas away, then we coated the surface with a text gel, which hardens, it’s sort of like a plastic medium I guess.

(Paul shows third shadow plate)

The third plate is this plate here, which is called a shadow plate. Basically you do the shadow tones, the illusion of 3 dimensions.

(Paul shows print of first 2 plates, then brings in 3rd plate, then shows final print)

Without putting that shadow on, the image looks flat. There’s no tonal difference. It’s just a yellow plate and a red plate. But when we print the shadow plate on, which is this plate here, then you get the combination of this image here, which is a flat wood block, and then it turns into something like this.

(Paul working on print with Dimitri Lihachov)

This is called reduction printing. That’s where you print a light colour first, and you carve away some of the areas, and you print the next slightly darker colour on top of it.

This is Dimitri.

Dimitri Lihachov:

How are you?

Paul Smith:

We have traced the areas, you can see where this black outline is, this is the area that we want to keep. Then the areas in between are the areas that we cut away. They’re called negative areas. The areas we don’t want anymore.

(Dimitri works on last plate, ink rollers in his hands)

This is the last, very last plate. It’s the plate that makes the very dark lines in the print. I’m just showing you how we ink up, just using rollers. You can see the light areas in this plate are actually areas that we cut away.

So before, this plate was about that wide, this image, and each time we print a darker colour we cut away a bit more so the darker line is only just the very end, the tail end of the print

The ink’s printed up, and we’re going to register the print.

(Paul and Dimitri place print on press)

The paper is placed on top of the block which has been inked up and we put a blanket on top of that. We just then roll through the press.

(Dimitri rolls the paper through the press, Paul lifts the final print)

Remove the blanket, and that’s the final colour.

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