plates

These are the plates that were the first two I made. They are high relief plates and so as a result you only print the raised area of the plates (shows up as bright orange in the photo). You can layer the colors, and print on thin Japanese paper that is attached when you run the plate through the press (Chine Colle) but the transparency you use to make the plate from has to be black or clear, grey tones don't show up. I REALLY like the look of these plates. Just by themselves they are beautiful.

You expose the plate with the transparency on it for 1.5 minutes, wash it for a LOOONNNGG time til it gets very well defined, then harden under the same light for 5 minutes. Easy peasy and very addictive.

Solarplate printing, part 1

This is a print without ink from the first solarplate that I made in the class I am taking at the Lower East Side Printshop, which is not in the Lower East Side anymore. When I started thinking about what I wanted to print, I had to go back through all my photographs to find things that would work in stark black and white, since that was what we were going to be printing first. I gathered a bunch of photos and spent a couple of days transforming them into clear black and white, no gradient, sizing them and printing them on transparency film. This is how it printed once I inked it up.

We made the plates by exposing the Solarplates to the black and white transparencies in a lightbox. The timings are exacting, and the parameters are very precise, but it is fun to do. They say you can expose the plates in the sun, and I am going to HAVE to try that, but it seems fraught with issues doing it here. Using the sun makes the time for exposure up to 20 or 30 minutes, and the lightbox takes 1.5 minutes. Needless to say, I am figuring a way to rig up a light box, since I have a lot of the parts already from old grow-lights I used to grow plants when I first moved up north. Hmmmmmm............

I also tried another photo, and I like it, but not as much. I used a photo of skaters at Rockefeller Center.

I like it printed in red, but wish I had gone all the way and drawn on the photo to show the tops of the figures better.. but .. that is why this is called a learning process, right?

of course, it could all be due to who's up next in the batting rotation

but I prefer to believe in illogical similarities

and yet again............

I have done this before... and I got two different results. This time was yet a third view of my writing, but I think this one is all about my abject lack of punctuation skills. I like lots of dots......... and my friends all say it reflects the way I talk. Jumping off in one direction and having it link indirectly to another, often without any obvious similarity to what was going on before. I have one friend who stops me in mid sentence and says "define link" and I have to tell her why I skittered off that way. When I studied Irish Literature in College I was told that Ulysses was designed to be read aloud or at least sub-vocal, hearing the flow of words in your mental ears.

So......

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

The lifeguard

When I take a shower and I look out of the tub, this is what I see. The Lifeguard. She is always there making sure I don't drown.

Calle Ocho

I had a wonderful dinner the other night at Calle Ocho. My friends were visiting and I try to find somewhere fun to go. Calle Ocho had gotten a mention as having the best Bread Basket on a blog I read and we decided to try that out. My bread basket pictures didn't come out well, perhaps because I was so busy eating the bread that I didn't hold the camera steady, but if you check out Gill's blog you can see a different appetizer by no yucca breadlets either.  I guess we were all too busy eating them cuz they were YUMMY.

As for this, ....hmmmmmm Found on the street and interesting, but if anyone wants to explain it, I am all ears.  I get the Up Down West and East part, and the Pi symbol but the rest of it eludes me.

view from the Staten Island Ferry

On a clear day you can see the whole South End of the Island