I have seen several people using this little machine to create prints at home with. As most of you know I have been visiting Handprinted.co.uk for their fab Friday workshops the past year and have got hooked on printing.
So I thought this would be a great little machine I could use at home or even use with my art students.
So my wonderful Stu bought me one for Christmas! I’m so lucky! He’s such an enabler!
Well a few weeks ago my daughter and I had a go on the Xcut to do some simple drypoint printing.
I thought I best show Stu how much I love him so I had a go at making him a Valentines card titled ‘Sexy Pants’.
R was much more sensible and drew a wolf (one of her go to themes).
Here’s what happened:
1. We scored out designs into the drypoint plastic.
2. Then we made little templates on paper to keep our plate and paper aligned.
3. Next we inked up our plates with Akua intaglio ink, here’s R trying not to get too messy!
4. Now you can see our plates inked and wiped clean, ready for printing.
5.We then wet our paper, which was only cheap sketching paper (probably 110gms), so a quick dip in the water and then a good pat down on the J-cloth.
6. Our plates were placed on the press. I just used the white plastic base plate that came with the machine (none of the metal ones) and 2 pieces of kids crafting felt on top. I set the roller to 4, which meant it pressed very hard, but was a bit of a fiddle as I had to keep the felt under the rollers at the end of each roll or it was a pain to tuck them back in neatly as the gap was so thin.
7. Roll and reveal!
8. R then tried a different colour ink and added red to her black…. You know… for dramatic effect.
9. Here was the little set hung up to dry.
10. Well this was all too easy. So we upped the game and added some chine colle. I used tiny bits of tissue paper to colour the pants and R used some Japanese paper for a moon. We did add a little pritstick to the back, only because on R’s there wasn’t much ink/impression to hold it down.
11. And here are our 2 finished prints. So easy and so much fun. We will be using this a lot. Next time with better paper and a bit tidier conservatory!
Blog you later...