Printmaking - Imprint

For me, print making D a unit is sooo exciting. There is something about it that makes it brand new and exciting every time  I do it... But that comes with the da ger of getting lost in a tangent and I came dangerously close to losing myself this year!

I decided way back I was going to look at Screen Printing from the very start as it tended to be the area I most avoided in past years. I am clumsy and the heavy screen and accuracy of stencil cutting have never been my strong points. And again ii struggled.
My hands would shake madly when cutting my stencils leaving big tears and then tears. Recovering from my Laest relapse tail end of October and early November didn't help and I just thought "fuck this, how am I going to produce anything good with my shitty hands??"

So after my week of huffying I decided I was going to ask the question - do I need this paper stencil??

Turns out no! Finding objects like ribbon and string and placing them under the screen produces surprisingly effective results!

And this triggered my excitement again! I started putting everything I could think of under the screen - and purchasing my own little screen for sketchbook work.

But alas the technique grew tiresome with it being very unpredictable, dependant on quality of ink, semi permiableness (new word???)  of the material in use and not knowing where to go from here I decided to bite the bullet and go  Back to stencils. Now at this point it was pretty late in the game and my sketchbook was full of these none paper stencil prints so I went back to basics and printed out a portrait of myself and created a wee stencil of it. It took forever. So long actually I didn't want to print it because I knew it would be gone and unusable again unless I had my idea then and there.
So  here, I procrastinated more. Looking up yet other ways to print make. Maybe use mono in some way???
But what would I do?? I referred back to my little book of monoprint samples. I created last year. Nothing was jumping out at me.

But then!!

I came across this little article on "Picasso and Pochoir printmaking"

I was confused.

What was this Pochoir?? Why hadn't Niall taught me this before??
I frantically Googled but bring a French word it pulled up a load of sites in French.

Considered learning French.

Desided against it and googled "Pochoir in English"

At first the result filled me with a horrid anti climax.

Stencil. It means stencil!!

For fuck sake I have just went round in a big circle!! It's just Stencil screen printing .. Grr!!

But then... Down at the bottom of the search page was an example of Ponchoir printing .. In a way I had never thought about. It was inking up each stencil and putting them through the press with them all over lapping them flipping the off to reveal a new inked up stencil with an array of colours and textures.

I was intruiged!

Do this being late on a Saturday night I desided to give it a go at home and see if it works without a press. The video gave no instructions of what material to use so I just started by using some sketchbook paper to see if it worked. I could see by the video the press was adjusted to etching because of the embossing of the stencils on the Back of the paper... I could try that at college but for now I would try without.

Very faint but I have me enough to get excited about it!  I wanted to try this in a bigger Scale!

Unfortunately this close to hands in proved difficult to get access to the printing press... (I ended up returning to traditional screen print for my final work but I will definitely be looking into this further :)