feather2pixels

In the continued spirit of me making shitty little things, Adrienne sent me pictures of our Castro Street Fair booth and I did a collage:

More letterpress! So far, my two strongest impressions of printing on a press are related:

Success!

Kind of.

I went ahead with my next CMYK experiment : a full page print with ever bigger halftones–they are really big now. And it worked. Up close it’s just clusters of large dots in four colors, but from across the room the image focuses and the colors mix:

The image is actually a small section of a panorama of Balboa and 34th Ave (a key intersection in my life, within sight of the essential Balboa Theater and the Dumpling King) I photographed this week:

So my next step is to print the whole thing in the four CMYK layers. The print will be about five feet long.

I have been experimenting with a bastardized CMYK printing process. It interests my inner scientist: how do three essentially florescent colors manage to fool the eye into experiencing the entire spectrum, and how far can one take that illusion with screen printing?

I took three full days to conduct an initial study at the Cellspace silkscreen loft (It’s great: there are no workshops going on and so, with the exception of the vaguely territorial tabby cat, I have the whole place to myself). I took six different 669 peel-apart Polaroids from the first half of 2007 and reproduced them on a series of two hundred postcards.

The original photograph was scanned:

and digitally separated into it’s four base channels: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. I forced each channel to exaggerated halftones and exposed each one on a separate screen.

I mixed my own batch of transparent cyan, magenta, yellow, and black and printed the four screens on the same postcard in that order. This example of Bartlett Street was probably the most successful of the six, though they all looked interesting. Here is the progression from one to four colors:

I can definitely move forward from here. I like the exaggerated halftones because the image and the colors only resolve themselves from a distance. On a more cerebral level, I like how it draws attention to the optical illusion of the printing process: at one glance its a cluster of dots and at another glance it is a photographic image. I want to experiment with making the halftone dots even bigger.