The assignment I did these for was “A series of four solar plate relief prints”, pictured are the digital drawing I translated into a plate (made in Krita) and three of the final four prints.
For the subject matter, I wanted to incorporate the same sort of city skyline I was exploring the design of in painting last semester, but I also wanted to include some figures so I could work with that kind of composition for a change. The result is Beffery, the character design which actually inspired the city paintings, and his friend Ollo, standing on a roof under the night sky. I added the huge moon because I really wanted to try my hand at translating the sort of high contrast landscape you see in pictures of the moon into a print. It wound up all having a very stylized, graphic look, which I emphasized by shading the floor and sky with stripes at opposite diagonals, to help draw the composition together.
Overall I’m quite pleased with how the composition turned out, although I found myself struggling to create it and that tells me I should step out of my comfort zone some more in the future and try working with more complex scenes. As for the technicalities of printing, it took a long time and a lot of prints before I got four I was happy with. I did wind up with decently nice consistency between the prints, but some of them were still somewhat uneven with inking so I need a better system for consistently inking the plate. Making sure there was only ink on the raised parts of the plate was also a pain, I’d like to try carving linoleum for a future project since although carving takes time, there’s more of a gap between raised and lowered surfaces.
