Preparation and Plates.

With numerous ideas rattling around in my head, the time has come to go with the flow and get busy. That's how it went yesterday morning as I set up for a new reduction print and made a number of Solarplates. The plan is to have a few things going at the same time so I can switch back and forth between projects. We'll see how this works out.

When I worked on my last reduction print, I had attached the registration pins directly to the bed of the press. This tied up the press for the duration of the project.

This time, I taped all my registration to a separate sheet of plexiglass so I can just lift everything off the bed and set it aside and not worry about messing up the registration.  This frees up the press when I want to print intaglio plates.

Here's the new sheet of plexiglass with all my registration in place. 

Another new thing I'm trying involves transferring the image to the linoleum. I find that if I transfer the entire image to the linoleum, before printing, some of the lines show up through the ink. I've also had parts of the image erase as the plate is cleaned.

To avoid this, I set up a couple of the Ternes-Burton registration pins on my drawing table, along with a right angle guide for the linoleum block. This should enable me to accurately position the linoleum with the master drawing each time I'm ready to transfer the next areas to be cut before printing. As long as I make sure the linoleum is tucked into the right angle and the master drawing doesn't move, everything should line up nicely.