Printing Experiments

Yesterday I spent the day experimenting with the image shown above. A work colleague had asked if I could create an image that made her grandson look like one of his favourite superheroes. I explained that as many of them were masked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would probably work best as he could recognise himself. Rather than trying to draw a brand new image I decide just to use existing images and photos. This allowed me to do the work quickly and experiment with backgrounds and other tools to try and make the image look more like a drawing than a photo.

This also led to me trying out some experiments with printing, using different papers and acetone sheets to see what effects these would have on the image. The first trials involved using both watercolour paper and canvas sheets. Using these altered the image and gave the work a more painterly finish and lightened the overall tone as shown below.

 

The I tried printing onto to acetone sheets, this gave an unexpected result. The print came out in little dots due to the printing process of my machine. This print stayed wet as it had nothing to dry into, so I then took a relief print from this one. These give more of a silhouette, less defined character and could come in handy later on for character shape, both are shown below.

After printing on the acetone I wanted to see what happened with the machine so I printed onto paper again. This produced something very interesting as there must have been inks that had not taken to the acetone and were now on the paper. The ink was overloaded and caused various runs to occur when left to dry, this is shown below.

Having carried out so many prints there were some that came out with lines, marks etc. These ones were then worked on with paints just to see what happened. These give shapes and tones that may possibly lead to the creation of new characters that might make it into the picture book. Experimenting with these images will determine there future use, an example is shown below.

These exercises are just part of experimentation to see what possibilities there are open to me. Perhaps I may create something and decide it might look better with less detail, using a method of printing onto a particular material or paper may change the image and can then be scanned back in. These are only possibilities that might be used in future or help me develop ideas I cannot think of at this present moment, only time will tell.